DailyDot Culture Feedhttp://www.dailydot.com/topics/culture/Recent Culture articles from Daily Doten-usTue, 15 Nov 2016 10:30:00 +0000The 5 Best Fitness Appshttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/best-free-fitness-apps/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/51/c3/51c3ced1483c9426fb3c2a1a21d45075.jpg'></p>
<p>Let's get real. Our daily schedules are packed, and sometimes it feels as if we don't have the extra push to get up after a long day to go workout. Luckily, getting an effective workout is a download away with top fitness apps that assist you in getting everything you need out of that run around the block.&nbsp;</p><p>You can spend hundreds of dollars on a new fad diet and steep gym memberships, or you can rely on one of these five free fitness apps to reach your goals.</p><h2>1) <a href="https://sworkit.com/">Sworkit</a></h2><p>The app's name is short for "simply work it," and it captures the app's mission exactly. Users have the option to pick more than 20 different pre-built workouts like cardio, yoga, strength training, and stretching. Each workout guides users with audio cues and real trainers who demonstrate the motions.&nbsp;</p><p>Besides the clean,&nbsp;user-friendly&nbsp;interface, the best thing about Sworkit is that it allows you to tailor specific workout lengths to your schedule. Users can snag in a quick or lengthy personal workout at any minute of the day.</p><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTUwMjc4NjVfMTAyMTEyNTI4NTcxNDM5MzFfNjU4OTY0NjQxMjg5NDY4OTMyNF9uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIFN3b3JraXQgQXBwIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoibm9uZSIsInR5cGUiOiJpbWFnZSJ9"></div><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTUwNTU3NzlfMTAyMTEyNTI4NTY3NDM5MjFfNTEzMjYyNTgxOTk3MjYzNTA1MV9uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIFN3b3JraXQgQXBwIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoibm9uZSIsInR5cGUiOiJpbWFnZSJ9"></div><h2>2) <a href="http://www.c25kfree.com/">C25K</a></h2><p>C25k, otherwise known as "Couch to 5k," is the perfect fitness app if you are a beginner trying to reach a set goal. This app gets you off your couch, literally, and trains you in intervals to prepare you for running a 5k after an eight-week plan. Users will workout three times a week, with breaks between each day, and each session will last between 30 to 40 minutes. C25k is very&nbsp;user-friendly,&nbsp;and it helps you feel positive after each day completed.</p><p>The point of the app is to show users that it is alright if you weren't born a runner; you can just as easily transform into one.&nbsp;</p><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTQ5ODA3MjVfMTAyMTEyNTI4NTY0NjM5MTRfNTYwNDEwNzg4Nzc3Nzc1NTk3NV9uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIEMyNUsgQXBwIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoiIiwidHlwZSI6ImltYWdlIn0."></div><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTQ5OTM0NTRfMTAyMTEyNTI4NTYyNjM5MDlfNjA4Nzg4NjY4NzM0NTU3MTYzNl9uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIEMyNUsgQXBwIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoiIiwidHlwZSI6ImltYWdlIn0."></div><h2>3) <a href="http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/nike-plus/training-app">Nike+ Training Club</a></h2><p>Nike+ Training Club is designed specifically for women, but ideally anyone can use it. The app includes more than 85 instructor-narrated workout routines curated by Nike’s professionals, pro athlete,s and celebrities like <em>Glee</em> star Lea Michele, Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson, and personal trainer Ary Nunez, who trains&nbsp;<a href="http://dailydot.com/tags/rihanna/" target="_self">Rihanna</a>. The app tracks your progress the more you use it and utilizes a reward system as encouragement to keep pushing. Users can link or create their own playlist to go along with the routines, while audio cues help you along the way.&nbsp;</p><p>The app gives you the option to create an end goal, tailoring each workout to help you achieve the level of fit you desire. Be prepared before beginning your workout with Nike+. The app doesn't take breaks lightly.</p><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTQ5OTE4MjZfMTAyMTEyNTMwNDc3MDg2OTVfMTAwMDMyMzc1MTY5NzAxNjI5M19uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIE5pa2UrIFRyYWluaW5nIENsdWIgQXBwIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoiIiwidHlwZSI6ImltYWdlIn0."></div><br class="dd-embed-br"><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTQ5NjI1NjBfMTAyMTEyNTMwNjM1MDkwOTBfMTY5NjQ5NzM1ODk5MDY1NzM4MF9uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIE5pa2UrIFRyYWluaW5nIENsdWIgQXBwIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoiIiwidHlwZSI6ImltYWdlIn0."></div><h2>4) <a href="https://www.strava.com/">Strava</a></h2><p>Strava takes tracking your run or cycle ride to a whole other level. The app lets you map and keep&nbsp;record&nbsp;of your distance by integrating a geographic map. It includes a "Labs" feature to test different outcomes, like the ability to replay your cardio trail on&nbsp;its&nbsp;desktop interface after you have finished.</p><p>The most interesting aspect about Strava is competition. The app lets you follow your friends to see just how good they actually say they are at running or cycling. After you have completed your customized workout, you can compare your performance against other runners and riders who have the app as well to see who hit the finish line first. Many who run marathons use the app to track their biggest competitors to target them and take notes for the next race.</p><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTUwMzI4NDVfMTAyMTEyNTI4NTU5NDM5MDFfMjE4MTgwMjAwMTUyNzI5NDIxM19uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIFN0cmF2YSBBcHAiLCJjcmVkaXRMaW5rIjoiIiwiY2FwdGlvbiI6IiIsIndpZHRoIjoiIiwidGV4dHdyYXAiOiIiLCJ0eXBlIjoiaW1hZ2UifQ.."></div><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTQ5NjMyNTNfMTAyMTEyNTI4NTU3ODM4OTdfODUwMzAxMzIzNTk2MTQ3OTQ5MV9uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIFN0cmF2YSBBcHAiLCJjcmVkaXRMaW5rIjoiIiwiY2FwdGlvbiI6IiIsIndpZHRoIjoiIiwidGV4dHdyYXAiOiIiLCJ0eXBlIjoiaW1hZ2UifQ.."></div><h2>5) <a href="http://www.charitymiles.org/">Charity Miles</a></h2><p>With every&nbsp;mile&nbsp;you run or walk using Charity Miles, you are able to make a difference to more than 30&nbsp;worldwide&nbsp;charities. The interface is sleek, easy to use, and straightforward. Before each use, you choose a charity like Feed America, Stand Up To Cancer, or Habitat For Humanity, and proceed with your exercise of choice. According to the app's website, $1.7 million has been raised with the deadline of May 2017 in the distance.&nbsp;</p><p>Whether you are on a leisure stroll with your dog, walking to catch the bus, or running your favorite trail Charity Miles helps you to feel like you accomplished more than just a workout.</p><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTQ5NDc4OTBfMTAyMTEyNTI5NjAzMDY1MTBfNzE4MzM0MjM5MjIyOTY5ODE5OF9uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIENoYXJpdHkgTWlsZXMgQXBwIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoiIiwidHlwZSI6ImltYWdlIn0."></div><br class="dd-embed-br"><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvMTEvMTEvMTQ5NTY0OTJfMTAyMTEyNTI5NjEyMjY1MzNfNDQwNjMxOTczMzMwNTY0ODUyNF9uLmpwZyIsImNyZWRpdCI6IlNjcmVlbnNob3QgdmlhIENoYXJpdHkgTWlsZXMgQXBwIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoiIiwidHlwZSI6ImltYWdlIn0."></div><p>These apps are free to download, so you really don't have any more excuses left to avoid your next run.</p>
<p></p><p></p>
kristen.k.hubby@gmail.com (Kristen Hubby)Tue, 15 Nov 2016 10:30:00 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/best-free-fitness-apps/Culture'Serial' star Adnan Syed granted new murder trialhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/serial-adnan-syed-court-order-new-trial/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/8a/5e/8a5ebb1bba4e3ba8883e2d37104fae46.jpg'></p>
<p>Fans who were woefully disappointed by hit podcast <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/tags/serial/">Serial</a>’s lackluster season 1 finale can rejoice.</p><p><a href="http://www.dailydot.com/tags/adnan-syed/">Adnan Syed</a> will finally get a new trial for the murder of <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/tags/hae-min-lee/">Hae Min Lee</a>. News broke on <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/topics/twitter/">Twitter </a>on Thursday that the man at the center of the hit podcast would finally get a chance at freedom.</p><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-oembed" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwczovL3R3aXR0ZXIuY29tL0NKQnJvd25MYXcvc3RhdHVzLzc0ODYxMjk0ODc0NzEyODgzMiIsInR5cGUiOiJvZW1iZWQifQ.."></div><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-oembed" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwczovL3R3aXR0ZXIuY29tL2p1c3Rpbmdlb3JnZS9zdGF0dXMvNzQ4NjIwNjc1OTQ3MDQ0ODY4IiwidHlwZSI6Im9lbWJlZCJ9"></div><p>Die-hard fans can also comb through the <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bal-document-adnan-syed-granted-new-trial-20160630-htmlstory.html" target="_blank">court document</a> granting the new trial.</p><p>Syed was convicted in 2000 of killing his ex-girlfriend, a Woodlawn High School classmate, and burying her body in Baltimore's Leakin Park. He’s been serving a life sentence ever since.</p><p>You can breathe easy now, <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/tags/sarah-koenig/">Sarah Koenig</a>. You might just have that big denouement your fans were hoping for.</p><p><em>H/T </em><a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-adnan-syed-new-trial-20160630-story.html" target="_blank"><em>Baltimore Sun</em></a></p>
nayomi.reghay@gmail.com (Nayomi Reghay)Thu, 30 Jun 2016 23:34:36 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/serial-adnan-syed-court-order-new-trial/CultureHow to become Instagram famous: A guidehttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/how-to-become-instagram-famous/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/65/6f/656ff87b7a48feede5607d02adae2860.jpg'></p>
You know that one friend you had growing up who took a hundred selfies a day, and sported a full face of makeup before eight in the morning? That friend has now moved to L.A., become a "model," only dons the color black, and has over 15,000 followers on Instagram.&nbsp;<p>She is Exhibit A of what you would call&nbsp;<em>Instagram famous</em>.</p><p>When trying to become an Instagram celebrity, the how's and to's require a certain science. There are different factors that matter, from when to post to what to post. But after you get the swing of it, your new fabulous life is just a few food stagings and filters away.</p><h3><br>Read more from the Daily Dot:</h3><p></p><ul><li><strong><a href="http://www.dailydot.com/technology/how-to-manage-multiple-instagram-accounts/">How to manage multiple Instagram accounts</a></strong></li><li><strong><a href="http://www.dailydot.com/lol/stephanie-sarley-fruit-fingering-art-instagram/">The juicy world of Instagram's controversial fruit-fingering artist</a></strong></li></ul><p></p><p>The first step to creating your Instagram empire is to think of your Instagram profile as a color story. The next step is deleting all the blurry pictures that you snapped on late nights out, or the flowers on the side of the road you didn't slow down in the car to capture. Nobody wants to see those.</p><p>Create a clean sequence where each photo blends with the next in content and color—this will make your profile aesthetically pleasing and attract followers. Avid Instagrammers go crazy over profiles centered on one main color. Especially white. Or cream.</p><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvNi8yMS9pbnN0YWdyYW1fY2xpcC5wbmciLCJjcmVkaXQiOiJ3d3cuaW5zdGFncmFtLmNvbS9uYWRpYWF6bXkvIiwiY3JlZGl0TGluayI6IiIsImNhcHRpb24iOiIiLCJ3aWR0aCI6IiIsInRleHR3cmFwIjoiIiwidHlwZSI6ImltYWdlIn0."></div><p>Naturally, everyone finds their "beat" just a few weeks into their Instagram career. If glorious food is abundant in your gentrified neighborhood, or your outfits are always on point, you've hit the jackpot.&nbsp;</p><p>Popular accounts find a theme and stick to it. Foodies can be spotted at the fad restaurant of the month, standing on a chair to get that perfect angle from above (guilty as charged). Fashion enthusiasts "flaunt" their best outfit on a carefree stroll through the city, or they mix it up with a melted ice cream cone in hand to show off their bejeweled fingers.</p><p>But remember trends change. Much like that avocado toast you captured a few weeks ago in the middle of a busy brunch, some fads are already dead and gone. However, one thing that will remain for a while are walls. People go crazy over walls.&nbsp;</p><p></p><div class="ddgce-embed ddgce-embedded-image" contenteditable="false" data-value="eyJ1cmkiOiJodHRwOi8vY2RuMC5kYWlseWRvdC5jb20vdXBsb2FkZWQvaW1hZ2VzL29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMTYvNi8yMS9pbnN0YWdyYW1fY2xpcDIucG5nIiwiY3JlZGl0Ijoid3d3Lmluc3RhZ3JhbS5jb20vbG9jYWxfbWlsay8iLCJjcmVkaXRMaW5rIjoiIiwiY2FwdGlvbiI6IiIsIndpZHRoIjoiIiwidGV4dHdyYXAiOiIiLCJ0eXBlIjoiaW1hZ2UifQ.."></div><p>And don't forget about the captions. They should be just as creative as the photographs. Don't be a bore and tell the internet what you did that day, or state plainly what you posted. Let loose, unleash the punny jokes, and don't be afraid to use a few emojis. Scratch that, use two maximum. &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>Timing also matters. According to a study by the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/25/get-instagram-likes_n_6751614.html">Huffington Post</a>, Latergramme found the best time to post on Instagram is at 2am, when your followers are coming back from the bars, or 5pm, when the world retires from a day of work. Also, posting on Wednesday and Sunday at 5pm will give you the highest amount of overall likes—which is the entire point.</p><p>Of course, paying attention to time can be a burden—especially if you're too busy running around town finding your next Instagram post—but that's nothing an alarm can't fix.</p><p>Of all these tips and tricks to becoming an Instagram star, the most important is to be present. Post and engage with users frequently, but do not let your dream of fame get in the way of your everyday life. Or, at least, what you want your everyday life to look like.</p><p></p>
kristen.k.hubby@gmail.com (Kristen Hubby)Sun, 26 Jun 2016 15:00:00 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/how-to-become-instagram-famous/IRLCultureJuggaloCoin turns virtual currencies into a circus acthttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/juggalocoin-bitcon-juggalo-insane-clown-posse-why/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/a7/78/a778a9be197f31d1551ccd5b41d7bffc.jpg'></p><p dir="ltr">
&quot;You don&rsquo;t have to be black to support Civil Rights, and you don&rsquo;t have to be a Juggalo to support the Juggalo Family.&quot;</p>
<p>
That&#39;s a real sentence, written in perfect summation of what purports to be the newest contender to the established glut of alternative cyrptocurrencies (<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/tags/bitcoin">Bitcoin</a> knockoffs, to the cynical): the JuggaloCoin.</p>
<p>
It&#39;s named, of course, after&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/tags/juggalos">Juggalos</a>, the subculture of fans devoted to Insane Clown Posse, clown makeup, Faygo soda, and weed&mdash;a scene that may one day prove to have been an elaborate prank played on America by working class midwesterners and the journalists who profiled them.</p>
<p>
But if JuggaloCoin turns out to be a ruse, its creator, &quot;Papa Nutt,&quot; put an awful lot of effort into it. A visit to <a href="http://juggalocoin.org">juggalocoin.org</a> shows extensive <a href="http://juggalocoin.org/earnings/">disclaimers</a> and elaborate plans for charities and businesses to get bonus juggalocoins if they buy in early. He envisions a world where Juggalos &quot;help each other out&quot; around the world by easily sending each other funds, and selling each other used furniture without the hassle of cash. &quot;It&rsquo;s a great way to support the Family,&quot; he writes.</p>
<p>
As great as JuggaloCoin might be, few people, if any, seem to be using it. The coin is supposed to debut with an operation called &quot;The Hatchet Drop,&quot; whereby anyone who tweets their wallet with the hashtags <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23JuggaloCoin&amp;src=tyah">#JuggaloCoin</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Coins4Fam&amp;src=typd">#Coins4Fam</a> would be gifted free coins. But a quick search on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/communities/twitter">Twitter</a>&nbsp;shows that of the handful of people who have ever used those hashtags, none included a wallet.</p>
<p>
Of course, it&#39;s possible that Papa Nutt knows exactly what he&#39;s getting into, and is trying to bilk hardworking Juggalos across America out of their money. But if that&#39;s the case, it&#39;s not working well yet. Recall that all Bitcoin transactions are public. The Bitcoin <a href="https://blockchain.info/address/1JPoagE9z27ekNttLNZp2n7H32Zy8VPnPU">wallet</a> he uses to receive money has never had a transaction, as of this writing.</p>
<p>
That raises an important question: when, exactly, is the Hatchet Drop supposed to happen? There isn&#39;t yet a scheduled date, though the site promises that &quot;today&quot; is the launch of its marketing campaign.</p>
<p>
The Daily Dot would have liked to reach out to Nutt for clarification, but <a href="http://juggalocoin.org/privacy/">he forgot</a>&nbsp;to put his email address on his website. We did, however, find contact information through a <a href="http://whois.net/whois/juggalocoin.org">Whois Lookup</a>. But considering Nutt lists his address as &quot;1 Clown Lane,&quot; we don&#39;t expect to receive a response.</p>
<p>
<em>H/T <a href="http://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/brace-yourselves-juggalo-bitcoins-are-coming">Vice</a>. Photo via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Juggalo_face_paint.jpg">WikiMedia Commons</a>&nbsp;(CC SA 2.0)</em></p>
kcollier@dailydot.com (Kevin Collier)Wed, 09 Apr 2014 14:30:45 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/juggalocoin-bitcon-juggalo-insane-clown-posse-why/BusinessCultureThe Internet is killing most languageshttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/internet-killing-languages/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/e7/33/e7332f5cde2f8d23154a9a2a53b89e00.jpg'></p><p>
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<strong>BY <a href="https://twitter.com/a_ben_richmond">BEN RICHMOND</a></strong></p>
<p>
You&nbsp;might be living through another mass extinction of species&mdash;brought on by us humans,&nbsp;<a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/welcome-to-the-6th-mass-extinction-event-scientists-say-a-human-caused-mass-extinction-is-at-hand--2">who have been changing climate and fragmenting habitats at an increasing clip</a>&mdash;but what you probably don&#39;t know is that you might also be living through a mass extinction of human languages&mdash;brought on by the magic of the internet.</p>
<p>
According to a paper titled&nbsp;<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0077056">&ldquo;Digital Language Death,&rdquo; just published in&nbsp;<em>PLOS One</em></a><em>,</em>&nbsp;less than five&nbsp;percent of the 7,000 languages spoken today will ascend to the digital realm. Granted, languages have been dying as long as they&rsquo;ve been spoken, but<a href="http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/">&nbsp;the Endangered Languages Project</a>&nbsp;reports that &ldquo;the pace at which languages are disappearing today has no precedent and is alarming.&rdquo; Andr&aacute;s Kornai, author of the new paper, blames the internet for why we&rsquo;re&nbsp;<a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/french-is-supposed-to-be-the-language-of-the-future-vraiment">more likely to be speaking French</a>&nbsp;than, say, Mandinka, in the future.</p>
<p>
The means and speed of language death might be new, but the pattern is old. According&nbsp;<a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/faq-on-endangered-languages/">to the UNESCO page on endangered languages</a>, &ldquo;a language disappears when its speakers disappear or when they shift to speaking another language&mdash;most often, a larger language used by a more powerful group. Languages are threatened by&nbsp;<em>external</em>&nbsp;forces such as military, economic, religious, cultural or educational subjugation, or by&nbsp;<em>internal</em>&nbsp;forces such as a community&rsquo;s negative attitude towards its own language.&rdquo; Both of these forces, Kornai argues, are exacerbated by the internet.</p>
<p>
The signs of eminent death for&nbsp;a language are a loss of function, where other languages take over entire functional areas such as commerce;&nbsp;a loss of prestige, as the young lose interest in learning and using the language;&nbsp;and finally a loss of competence, wherein a generation can maybe understand their elders, but don&rsquo;t really speak the language themselves.</p>
<p>
The great flat, globalized world of the internet&nbsp;operates pretty much as a monoculture, Kornai says. Only about 250 languages can be called well-established online, and another 140 are borderline. Of the 7,000 languages still alive, perhaps 2,500 will survive, in the classical sense, for another century, and many fewer will make it on to the internet.</p>
<p>
As a test of vitality, Kornai began where all research begins: Wikipedia. &ldquo;Experience shows that Wikipedia is always among the very first active digital language communities, and can be safely used as an early indicator of some language actually crossing the digital divide,&rdquo; Kornai writes. &ldquo;Children, as soon as they start using computers for anything beyond gaming, become aware of Wikipedia, which offers a highly supportive environment of like-minded users, and lets everyone pursue a goal, summarizing human knowledge, that many find not just attractive, but in fact instrumental for establishing their language and culture in the digital realm. To summarize a key result of this study in advance:&nbsp;<em>No wikipedia, no ascent.</em><em>&rdquo;</em></p>
<p>
<em>Read the full story <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-is-killing-most-languages">on Motherboard</a>.</em></p>
<p>
<em>Image via&nbsp;<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Biopics" title="User:Biopics">Hans Hillewaert</a>/Wikipedia Commons (CC SA 3.0 Unported)</em></p>
<dd.feed.feeds.NoneAuthor object at 0x7fc209200310>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 12:00:00 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/internet-killing-languages/WikipediaCulturePeople now literally getting high off Bitcoinhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/bitcoin-ecstasy-pills-reviews/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/0c/fd/0cfd748173974d137bbdd7c0925bdd8b.jpg'></p><p dir="ltr">
<a href="http://dailydot.com/tags/bitcoin">Bitcoin</a> enthusiasts are getting sweaty&mdash;and this time, not just because of frantic price fluctuations or the exchange service <a href="http://dailydot.com/tags/mt-gox">Mt. Gox</a> finding and losing hundreds of millions of dollars.</p>
<p>
Europeans are trying a hot new variant of the drug MDMA&mdash;better known as ecstasy&mdash;that adopts the name and logo of the world&#39;s most popular cryptocurrency, though there doesn&#39;t seem to be any other connection.</p>
<p>
<a href="http://dailydot.com/community/reddit">Redditor</a>&nbsp;and Bitcoin user omnibrain&nbsp;<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2130f8/i_heard_some_guy_in_the_restroom_of_a_club/">said</a> he overheard a guy in the restroom of a Swiss club talking about &quot;bitcoins.&quot; That prompted an &quot;extremely confusing conversation,&quot; he wrote, that led to a funny photo, though not a sale.</p>
<p>
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2014/3/24/bitcoinX.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 853px;" /></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>Photo by <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2130f8/i_heard_some_guy_in_the_restroom_of_a_club/">omnibrain</a></em></small></p>
<p>
Some people sure buy them, however.</p>
<p>
Since late November 2013, multiple users have reviewed Bitcoin the MDMA on the website pillreports.com, which encourages users post and review ecstasy variants around the world. Bitcoin the drug seems to be a European phenomenon, with reviewers referring to trying it in the Netherlands and U.K.</p>
<p>
&quot;Lovely waves of rushes, eye wobbles and some serious gurning (went through 2 packs of spoggy)!&quot; <a href="http://www.pillreports.com/index.php?page=display_pill&amp;id=33065">wrote</a> one U.K. reviewer, confirming that Cockney ravers and I speak a completely different language.</p>
<p>
&quot;my pupils were dilated as hell, i was cross-eyed for some time,&quot; wrote <a href="http://www.pillreports.com/index.php?page=display_pill&amp;id=33001">another</a>, &quot;but, these bitcoins are the shit!&quot; A third experienced &quot;teeth clenching and eye wobbles,&quot; and &quot;was sick&quot; after taking two, but still gave the drug his recommendation.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2014/3/24/wobble.jpg" style="width: 248px; height: 248px;" /></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>Photo via <a href="http://www.pillreports.com/index.php?page=display_pill&amp;id=33022">pillreports.com</a></em></small></p>
<p>
Another thread <a href="http://www.pillreports.com/index.php?page=display_pill&amp;id=32841">indicates</a> that there are at least four different kinds of ecstasy that use the name Bitcoin; indeed, photos of the drug often vary by submitter.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2014/3/24/bitcoin4.jpg" style="width: 390px; height: 150px;" /></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>Photo via <a href="http://www.pillreports.com/index.php?page=display_pill&amp;id=32841">pillreports.com</a></em></small></p>
<p>
Ironically, some of Bitcoin&#39;s earliest mainstream press came from reports that people could use it to order drugs through the late online black market <a href="http://dailydot.com/tags/silk-road/">Silk Road</a>, and ecstasy was the <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/crime/deep-web-best-most-popular-drug-reviews-ecstasy/">most popular</a>&nbsp;of those drugs. But none of the reviewers mentioned anything about the original Bitcoin; they seem to just take the name.</p>
<p>
&quot;Honestly I think the guy selling them had no idea what bitcoin even is,&quot; omnibrain <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2130f8/i_heard_some_guy_in_the_restroom_of_a_club/cg9e7z5">wrote</a>. &quot;I didn&#39;t buy any. I might have if he accepted bitcoins.&quot;</p>
<p>
<em>Photo via <a href="http://www.pillreports.com/index.php?page=display_pill&amp;id=33065">pillreports.com</a></em></p>
kcollier@dailydot.com (Kevin Collier)Mon, 24 Mar 2014 18:23:47 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/bitcoin-ecstasy-pills-reviews/UnclickCultureFormer NFL star counters every argument against gay playershttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/donte-stallworth-michael-sam/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/f3/f3/f3f32e8b39c48ccbe287638c66f0ca3d.jpg'></p><p>
The word being used over and over again in the rhetoric surrounding&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/michael-sam-interview/">NFL hopeful Michael Sam</a>&nbsp;and his recent declaration of his homosexuality is &ldquo;distraction&rdquo; and whether the announcement in and of itself will be one to any football team who drafts them.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
While a handful of anonymous individuals within NFL front offices have suggested that Sam&rsquo;s homosexuality will be&nbsp;<a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/college-football/news/20140209/michael-sam-draft-stock/">too much of a distraction for any team to overcome</a>, many have argued that the&nbsp;<a href="http://deadspin.com/distractions-are-bullshit-1495443299?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_twitter&amp;utm_source=deadspin_twitter&amp;utm_medium=socialflow">term is simply white noise</a>&mdash;that distractions don&rsquo;t amount to or derive from anything.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
Former NFL wide receiver Dont&eacute; Stallworth falls squarely in the second camp. Stallworth, who retired in 2012 after totaling 4,837 yards and 35 touchdowns in 10 seasons with six teams, knows a thing or two about distractions within an organization: In 2008, he was convicted of DUI manslaughter after hitting a pedestrian with his Bentley coup&eacute; and sentenced to 30 days in jail, in addition to a number of other mandates. He was also suspended by the NFL for the entire 2009 season.</p>
<p>
Since retiring, he&rsquo;s become a grounding voice on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/communities/twitter/">Twitter</a>, something made quite apparent last night when he sounded off on the idea that NFL teams wouldn&rsquo;t be able to handle the attention that comes with Sam.&nbsp;</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Herm Edwards posed a hypothetical question on epsn re: drafting Michael Sam, &quot;can (GM/owner/coach) handle the media... with this situation?&quot;</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432918042910027777">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
If any NFL team can&#39;t &quot;handle the media coverage&quot; of drafting Sam, then your team is already a loser on the field... let me tell you why...</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432919083349061632">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
There are a multitude of issues that can arise in the long duration of an NFL season... some on the field, some off the field.</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432922089234780161">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
You won&#39;t have any idea what that on the field/off the field situation is until it&#39;s already upon you and the entire organization...</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432922832465440768">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
You won&#39;t have any idea what that on the field/off the field situation is until it&#39;s already upon you and the entire organization...</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432922832465440768">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Which means that with drafting Michael Sam, you get a jump start on controlling the &quot;media coverage&quot; right from the onset.</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432923390916038656">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
If an organization is inept to the magnitude of not being able to control things with prior knowledge, how will you handle the unexpected?</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432924077355843586">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Case Study 1: The Miami Dolphins and the bullying scandal... players talked more about THAT than they did football... for weeks!</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432924845722963968">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
During that time I questioned (tweeted) why the Dolphins players were talking more about the scandal than their next opponent....</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432925748773412864">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Since the bullying story broke, the Dolphins finished the season 4-4...w/playoff hopes still alive, got spanked by division opp Jets, 20-7</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432926364191059970">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Case Study 2: The New England Patriots and Aaron Hernandez AND Tim Tebow situations...</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432926726708944896">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Beyond the state of shock I endured after the revelations of Hernandez, I knew that if ANY organization could handle this, it was the Pats.</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432927709509865472">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
This all happened right before training camp where players are supposed to come in w/clear minds in preparation for a long, rigorous season.</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432928132471877632">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Not only were there questions about Aaron, but also about the health of Gronkowski and how those two combined affected the team as a whole.</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432928691291582464">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Aaron is still awaiting trial &amp; Gronk played in only 7 games this season...but yet the Pats seemed to avoid those &quot;distractions&quot; altogether.</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432929991911682048">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Despite many season ending injuries to key pieces, the Pats finished 12-4 and lost to the Broncos in the AFC title with... ZERO distractions</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432930897692598272">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Not to mention the whole Tebow signing and (alleged subsequent) distraction wasn&#39;t even a blip on most radars... Why?</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432931387918663680">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Because Mr. Kraft and Bill Belichick would not allow ANY of that to be a &quot;distraction&quot; to ANYONE in the entire organization...</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432931784884371456">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Because Mr. Kraft and Bill Belichick would not allow ANY of that to be a &quot;distraction&quot; to ANYONE in the entire organization...</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432931784884371456">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
In my 10 years as an NFL player, I&#39;ve played for 6 different teams &amp; have been in every kind of locker room. Vet, young, mature, immature...</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432933437469499393">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
The leaders of an NFL organization AND the locker room better be able to handle adversity that is certain to emerge during a long NFL season</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432936170578661376">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
The leaders of an NFL organization AND the locker room better be able to handle adversity that is certain to emerge during a long NFL season</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432936170578661376">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
In my experience, if your organization can&#39;t &quot;handle media coverage&quot;, they will suck on the field anyway... but hey, there&#39;s always 2015...</p>
&mdash; Donte&#39; Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonteStallworth/statuses/432936272382795776">February 10, 2014</a></blockquote>
<p>
<em>Photo via <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=169172856434950&amp;set=pb.143964425622460.-2207520000.1392131551.&amp;type=3&amp;theater">Donte Stallworth</a>/Facebook</em></p>
chase@dailydot.com (Chase Hoffberger)Tue, 11 Feb 2014 15:35:52 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/donte-stallworth-michael-sam/TwitterIRLCultureOfficial French language snobs have a new word for 'sexting'http://www.dailydot.com/culture/french-word-academy-sexting/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/0d/66/0d663802f06966826242f879dde0e364.jpg'></p><p>
The verb &ldquo;<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/tags/sexting/">sexting</a>&rdquo; isn&rsquo;t the wittiest coinage, but Americans are crazy for portmanteaux these days. Still, unimpressed and looking to avoid the accidental incorporation of another term like &ldquo;le weekend&rdquo; into the French vernacular, L&rsquo;Acad&eacute;mie Francaise has coined an even more embarrassing word: &ldquo;textopornographie.&rdquo; (A single sext you may refer to as a &ldquo;textopornographique&rdquo; or &ldquo;sexto,&rdquo; if you think you can do so with a straight face.)</p>
<p>
The Acad&eacute;mie&rsquo;s Commission G&eacute;n&eacute;rale de Terminologie et de N&eacute;ologism came up with the terms in their most recent batch of official language updates, many of which seek to keep the French language on a short leash by providing nationally approved translations for the expressions popularized by filthy foreigners. Ever since 1635, when the institution was founded by Cardinal Richelieu, they have tried to stem the pollution of their mother tongue. &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>
It&rsquo;s not just pointless prescriptivism, either: while we blithely break the rules of&nbsp;<em>Strunk &amp; White,</em>&nbsp;the 40 so-called &ldquo;immortals&rdquo; of the semi-mystic intellectual group&nbsp;<a href="http://metro.co.uk/2012/10/01/french-fight-franglais-with-alternatives-for-english-technology-terms-590128/">had some success</a>&nbsp;getting citizens to switch from &ldquo;LOL&rdquo; to &ldquo;MDR,&rdquo; for &ldquo;mort de rire,&rdquo; or &ldquo;dying of laughter.&rdquo; In previous years,&nbsp;<a href="http://betabeat.com/2013/12/of-course-the-french-created-their-own-word-for-sexting/">Beatabeat reported</a>, they substituted &ldquo;courriel&rdquo; for &ldquo;email&rdquo; and &ldquo;mot-di&egrave;se&rdquo; for &ldquo;hashtag,&rdquo; always heading off any tech-based concessions to English.</p>
<p>
Given those other suggestions, &ldquo;textopornographique&rdquo; leaves a little something to be desired; it&rsquo;s awfully clinical, and the appellation of &ldquo;porn&rdquo; to a steamy digital correspondence between people who theoretically know each other is certainly wide of the mark. Meanwhile, the word&rsquo;s length and compound structure render it almost&mdash;dare we say it?&mdash;German. Sadly, they just say &ldquo;sexting&rdquo; over there. Probably because they&rsquo;re busy actually doing it.</p>
<p>
<em>H/T&nbsp;</em><a href="http://www.geekosystem.com/french-word-for-sexting/"><em>Geekosystem</em></a><em>&nbsp;| Photo by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pro-juventute/">Pro Juventute</a>/Flickr&nbsp;</em>&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
miles@dailydot.com (Miles Klee)Wed, 18 Dec 2013 18:55:34 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/french-word-academy-sexting/CultureCleverest video of 2013 puts translators in a whole new lighthttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/cleverest-video-appreciate-translators/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/cf/59/cf59eb1284581aed7ace93247902ad98.jpg'></p><p>
Great literature doesn&rsquo;t just magically translate itself&mdash;that&rsquo;s the point that CEATL, the European Council of Literary Translators&rsquo; Associations, seeks to make in their annual &quot;Spot the Translator&quot; video contest.</p>
<p>
The organization has called for submissions of &ldquo;sparky and clever short films,&rdquo; up to three minutes in length, &ldquo;reflecting the existence and importance of literary translators, their challenges, and their role in literature.&rdquo;</p>
<p>
The results of the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/144804399036962/permalink/175816922602376/">2013 competition</a> aren&rsquo;t in yet, but it&rsquo;ll be mighty difficult to top the counterintuitively titled &ldquo;Translators Are a Waste of Space,&rdquo; which makes use of reversible text to present and then dismantle a straw man argument using the exact same words both times.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
&ldquo;Translators are a waste of space, if you ask me&mdash;linguistic morons who think it&rsquo;s only a way to enchant readers who find, against all odds, translated literature interesting,&rdquo; the video begins, in oddly confrontational tones, going on to disparage the profession at length.</p>
<p>
Make it to the 1:30 mark, however, and you&rsquo;ll see the entire opinion reread scrolling backwards, wholly inverting its meaning, until we see the introduction/conclusion once more, in a different configuration: &ldquo;... these are rare individuals who make translated literature interesting, who find against all odds a way to enchant readers. It&rsquo;s only linguistic morons who think translators are a waste of space, if you ask me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>
<iframe class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="365" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UGYL5sUwr2Q?rel=0" title="YouTube video player" type="text/html" width="640"></iframe></p>
<p>
That&rsquo;s hardly the only contest entry&mdash;there&rsquo;s an entire <a href="http://dailydot.com/communities/facebook">Facebook</a> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/144804399036962/permalink/175816922602376/">page</a> of short videos celebrating the role of literary translators. CEATL will choose a winner from among the top ten most &ldquo;liked&rdquo; posts, so you&rsquo;ve got some say in who takes home top honors here. Still, we&#39;re pretty sure that Erik Skuggevik, who wrote and performed the monologue for The Norwegian Association of Literary Translators, can practically bank on winning that &euro;1,000 prize.</p>
<p>
In the meantime, why not make pick up <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fatso-Lars-Ramslie/dp/1905494122"><em>Fatso</em></a>, a Norwegian novel by Lars Ramslie, the English translation of which comes courtesy of <a href="http://wordswithoutborders.org/contributor/erik-skuggevik">Skuggevik and his partner, Deborah Dawkin</a>. Or, if you&rsquo;re feeling lazy, stream the <a href="http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70142781?strkid=198898569_0_0&amp;trkid=222336&amp;movieid=70142781">subtitled 2008 film version on Netflix</a>. Who translated it better? You decide!</p>
<p>
<em>Photo via <a href="http://www.imdb.com/media/rm318413056/tt0335266?ref_=ttmi_mi_all_pbl_18">IMDB</a></em></p>
miles@dailydot.com (Miles Klee)Wed, 04 Sep 2013 19:06:40 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/cleverest-video-appreciate-translators/YouTubeIRLCultureTwitter feminists call out feminism's white privilege problemhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/twitter-feminism-solidarity-white-women/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/eb/98/eb9834168fdb1a17a3551ea0884bf802.jpg'></p><p dir="ltr">
Yesterday, the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen was everywhere, trending on <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/communities/twitter">Twitter</a>, being hotly debated in feminist spaces and blogs, and stirring up conversation about the place of women of color in the &ldquo;mainstream feminist&rdquo; arena.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
The hashtag was coined by&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/Karnythia">Mikki Kendall</a>&nbsp;during a discussion of recently disgraced male feminist writer Hugo Schwyzer, who was criticized for his dismissing of non-white women in his work. The tag then went global when it was picked up by South African and Japanese tweeters.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
Many tweeted criticisms of&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/NanticokeNDN/status/366970977260814336/photo/1">how black women are portrayed in pop culture</a>&nbsp;as compared to white women, or&nbsp;<a href="http://storify.com/niche/solidarity-is-for-white-women?awesm=sfy.co_qCRW&amp;utm_campaign=">examples in their own lives</a>&nbsp;of being excluded from mainstream feminism.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p>
Miley sticks middle finger up in pics, smokes &amp; wears grills = just her being a kid. Trayvon does it = hes a thug <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen&amp;src=hash">#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen</a></p>
&mdash; Mixed Girl (Problem) (@mixdgrlproblems) <a href="https://twitter.com/mixdgrlproblems/statuses/367004680661909504">August 12, 2013</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p>
<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen&amp;src=hash">#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen</a> when convos about gender pay gap ignore that white women earn higher wages than black, Latino and Native men.</p>
&mdash; Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) <a href="https://twitter.com/RaniaKhalek/statuses/366974188457705472">August 12, 2013</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p>
<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SolidarityisforWhiteWomen&amp;src=hash">#SolidarityisforWhiteWomen</a> <a href="http://t.co/c7sfRBYBBn">pic.twitter.com/c7sfRBYBBn</a></p>
&mdash; Sarah (@buonasahra) <a href="https://twitter.com/buonasahra/statuses/367002100732944385">August 12, 2013</a></blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">
The hashtag has been divisive, though some white feminists are using it as an opportunity to educate themselves and take a backseat to the needs of non-white feminists.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p>
Fellow white feminists: <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen&amp;src=hash">#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen</a> is not for us to defend, explain, protest. It&#39;s time for us to take a damn seat &amp; listen.</p>
&mdash; ShelbyKnox (@ShelbyKnox) <a href="https://twitter.com/ShelbyKnox/statuses/366964908950159360">August 12, 2013</a></blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">
Kendall spoke on the matter&nbsp;<a href="http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/solidarity-is-for-white-women/520994382b8c2a23c20007f9">on Huffington Post Live</a>&nbsp;today at 12:15pm ET, which you can watch on the site now as well. There has long been criticism of how feminist sites like Jezebel allegedly erase women of color from the narrative:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p>
Al Jazeera reports on <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen&amp;src=hash">#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen</a> Jezebel does not. That&#39;s all you need to know. <a href="http://t.co/Tze6V3Lzsi">http://t.co/Tze6V3Lzsi</a></p>
&mdash; Kristen McHugh (@kristenmchugh22) <a href="https://twitter.com/kristenmchugh22/statuses/367329808977756160">August 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">
The hashtag&rsquo;s purpose comes down to recognizing privilege, the fact that middle- and upper-class white women have most often had the means and the time to devote themselves to feminism. But it&rsquo;s time for women of color to have a stronger voice in the mainstream movement. The focus needs to be on intersectionality. Anything else is not a complete and cohesive feminist movement. Solidarity is not just for white women.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
<em>Photo via&nbsp;<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/5103242802/sizes/z/in/photolist-8LXshS-8LUsKK-bS2jia-9qkG5w-8LXzKj-bEcjSU-ajUxrs-do3Wry-8LXFEd-8LXJdQ-85Z6Wm-86b49H-aGQxgH-d9AiTL-dUj71i-bxULyr-9k3iRr-fpSYgT-fpSYvr-fpSXVz-fq8cYu-fpSTQX-fpSSMg-fpSUv4-fpT2fp-fpT35Z-fq89qo-fpSXyp-fpSY6P-fpSYNx-fpT3tg-fpSTdz-fq88f1-fq8gVd-fpSU9v-fq8gCm-fq8a9N-fpSXpp-fq8gGY-fpT2AB-fq8h1J-fpT1X4-fq8gu7-fq89Nh-fpSU3x-fpT4Be-fq89yN-fpSXd8-fpSXz4-fq8diw-fpT2Np/">McKaySavage/Flickr</a></em></p>
gaby@dailydot.com (Gaby Dunn)Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:25:55 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/twitter-feminism-solidarity-white-women/TwitterIRLCultureTwitter Inc. finally comments on Weird Twitterhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/twitter-inc-comments-weird-twitter/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/b4/8d/b48d11392a105b2c346ec77c995ef583.jpg'></p><p>
In what you&rsquo;d have to call a journalistic coup for any news service, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> has, at long last, gotten&nbsp;<a href="http://dailydot.com/communities/twitter">Twitter</a>&nbsp;Inc. to comment on the heady subculture known as <a href="http://dailydot.com/tags/weird-twitter">Weird Twitter</a>.</p>
<p>
Weird Twitter, for the uninitiated, refers to a loose confederation of Twitter users who use the social network as a platform for experimental verbiage: satire, poetry, collage, <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/lol/fart-arr-diaper-dom-perignon-campaign/">diapers</a>&mdash;all are included. In its push for an eclectic and overdeveloped aestheticism, it resembles a 21st-century branch of Dada.</p>
<p>
Simply put, Weird Twitter is pushing the envelope in ways that do not necessarily align with Twitter&rsquo;s best financial interests. Take the whole sponsored posts angle, for instance: that&rsquo;s the type of corporate leaching that brings out the quiet anarchist in some people. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324328904578623811676679672.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet">As the <em>WSJ </em>explains</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Ryan Woodsmall, a 34-year-old information-technology worker in St. Louis., hates promoted tweets. When he notices one from, say, Wal-Mart or Bank of America, in his feed, he will reply to the tweet or retweet it after editing the tweet to insert misspelled words or other flourishes that he hopes will reflect poorly on the brand. He also does this because he hopes it will drive up the cost of advertising for the brand.</p>
<p>
&ldquo;It&#39;s just fractions of pennies and it&#39;s juvenile, but it&#39;s still satisfying,&rdquo; says Mr. Woodsmall.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
That satisfaction may not have much basis in reality, however. According to Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser, the company has an algorithm in place to ensure advertisers never pay for &ldquo;insincere&rdquo; engagement&mdash;meaning cubicle warriors like Woodsmall would have to get more creative in their disruptions.</p>
<p>
That&rsquo;s not the part that hurts most about Prosser&rsquo;s comments, however. In the article, he also framed Weird Twitter&rsquo;s protests, attitude, and policy of self-selection as &ldquo;the eternal battle people have over hipsterdom.&rdquo; Ouch. Meanwhile, a user, John Manoogian III, defended Weird Twitter as &ldquo;just regular people trying to reclaim the platform with ironic, meta-humor.&rdquo;</p>
<p>
Hard to know which comment Weird Twitter would be more offended by.</p>
<p>
<strong>CORRECTION:</strong> An earlier version of this article identified John Manoogian III as a Twitter employee. He is a Twitter user, but does not work for the company. We regret the error.</p>
<p>
<em>H/T&nbsp;<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324328904578623811676679672.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet">Wall Street Journal</a>&nbsp;</em>|&nbsp;<em>Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/">Bruce Sterling</a>/Flickr&nbsp;</em></p>
miles@dailydot.com (Miles Klee)Mon, 05 Aug 2013 15:59:29 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/twitter-inc-comments-weird-twitter/TwitterCultureInternet-addicted soldiers have no use for Playboy anymorehttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/military-porn-magazines-internet-craigslist-sex/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/20/8e/208ec87ef14aa8d0b3e4eeb06118a0b0.jpg'></p><p>
Hugh Hefner may have just lost his last, best customer: the U.S. military. With soldiers finding their pornography on free streaming websites&mdash;or opportunities for <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/news/military-craigslist-sex-baghdad/">actual sex on Craigslist</a>&mdash;interest in glossies like <em>Playboy</em> and <em>Penthouse</em> has all but dried up.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
In total, 891 different magazines (including craft title <em>Bead-It Today</em>, the anticonsumerist <em>Adbusters</em>, and <em>WWE Kids</em>, a wrestling periodical for children) will no longer be sold at on-base shops. Over the past 15 years, sales of such titles have dropped 86 percent. Army Lt. Col. Antwan C. Williams, a spokesman for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, <a href="http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130730/NEWS05/307300038/AAFES-stop-selling-adult-magazines-amid-slumping-sales">explained</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
The decision to no longer stock the material is a business decision driven by the time, money and energy required to facilitate buying habits, combined with decreasing demand. Magazine sales are on a sustained downward trajectory due to the proliferation of digital delivery.</p>
</blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">
Oddly enough, the decision to axe the magazines came shortly after the Department of Defense resanctioned the selling of <em>Playboy</em> et al. on military property. A group called Morality in Media had lobbied to ban adult magazines, but Pentagon officials were adamant that such material does not meet <a href="http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/article/20130729/NEWS05/307290026/DoD-Playboy-Penthouse-not-indecent">the criteria for indecency under federal law</a>. &nbsp;</p>
<p dir="ltr">
Morality in Media is at least a decade behind the times, of course: These days, military personnel are seeking their sexual release online, where you can find porn so explicit it would make Larry Flynt blush. Not just photos and videos, either; soldiers are experimenting with Internet-facilitated hookups, much in the way their twentysomething peers back home like to.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
The Craigslist sex problem is so bad, in fact, that internal bodies like the Naval Criminal Investigative Service have begun to <a href="http://betabeat.com/2013/07/american-soldiers-in-war-zones-just-wont-stop-soliciting-sex-on-craigslist/">enact sting operations</a> to catch anyone trying to get lucky. Marines show up for a casual encounter with an undercover agent and find themselves subject to a decidedly non-casual disciplinary proceeding.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
Of course, none of this is an issue for those brave fighting men and women who still use their God-given imaginations. We salute you for your sense of honor.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
<em>H/T <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/07/internet-made-military-stop-selling-playboy/67829/">Atlantic Wire</a> | Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbruppe/">S. Ruppe</a>/Flickr</em></p>
miles@dailydot.com (Miles Klee)Thu, 01 Aug 2013 16:12:01 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/military-porn-magazines-internet-craigslist-sex/CultureRepair Her Armor gives female warriors an outfit overhaulhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/repair-her-armor-skimpy-outfit-redesign/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/cf/55/cf5541420876ef4e308d6b957af4dac5.jpg'></p><p>
If you play video games, read comics, or generally pay attention to pop culture, you may have noticed that <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/culture/mike-lunsford-superhero-costumes-clothed/">female warriors and heroes</a> are often dressed <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/culture/hawkeye-initiative-superhero-poses-tumblr/">quite differently</a> from their male counterparts. From covering less to being molded to show off curves, armor and costumes for strong women seem bent on taking something away from their toughness.</p>
<p>
If you&rsquo;re worried about these portrayals and want to see them change, you&rsquo;re not alone.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/communities/tumblr/">Tumblr</a> user Tica has created a blog dedicated to fixing the armor of warrior women in pop culture. The blog is called<a href="http://repair-her-armor.tumblr.com/"> Repair Her Armor</a> and according to the description &ldquo;is dedicated to show and change the looks of ridiculous female armors (and other outfits) that women tend to have in media; such as games and comics.&rdquo;</p>
<p>
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/versus.jpg"><em><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/versus.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 771px;" /></em></a></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>An example showing the difference between armor designed for men and women. &ldquo;Just a slight difference,&quot; Tica writes. &quot;Slight.&rdquo;</em></small></p>
<p>
<br />
&ldquo;The purpose is to show that over-sexualized women is not &lsquo;empowering,&rsquo; but clearly offensive and ridiculous&mdash;not to mention it&#39;s also clearly out of context,&rdquo; Tica writes. &ldquo;We&#39;ll also show that their clothes could be greatly improved with a touch of common sense, equality and character.&rdquo;</p>
<p>
On the blog, Tica posts images of women wearing ridiculous armor and also shares how she would redesign the outfit. Her redesigns cover the often ludicrous amount of skin exposed and usually look better than the originals.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/28/armor.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/28/armor.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 425px;" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>The original (</em>left<em>) next to Tica&rsquo;s fixed version (</em>right<em>).</em></small></p>
<p>
<br />
Tica started Repair Her Armor on April 1 and already has a growing following. She accepts submissions from her readers of images they find and think are in dire need of repair as well as good examples of armor and even shares her readers&rsquo; own redesigns. She also doesn&rsquo;t mind being asked what armor she does<a href="http://repair-her-armor.tumblr.com/post/50701181113/anon-asked-out-of-curiousity-are-there-any"> like</a> and often will share positive examples on the blog.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/War.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/War.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 490px;" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>The original comic book cover (</em>left<em>) next to a fixed version (</em>right<em>) submitted to Repair Her Armor by Tumblr user northcentralpositronics</em>.</small></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/armorexamples.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/armorexamples.jpg" style="width: 440px; height: 422px;" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>Two examples of armor Tica likes: Aveline&rsquo;s warrior armor from Dragon Age II (</em>left<em>) and Titania&rsquo;s outfit from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (</em>right<em>).</em></small></p>
<p>
<br />
Every day she posts at least two submissions from readers, and she says the submissions keep pouring in. Some of her contributors are even concept artists in the industry, showing how the very people who might be able to make a difference from the start are eyeing her work.</p>
<p>
While many of the submissions and armor highlighted on the blog are from video games, she also points out ridiculous armor from other media and shares cartoons commenting on how prevalent the problem is. There are multiple posts showing the armor of men and women in the same media next to each other, where the problem becomes extremely clear. While the men wear full sets of armor, women often have their midriffs, legs, and top of their chests exposed. Even when women are covered up the designs that mold to women&rsquo;s chests giving them curves are impractical. As a<a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/05/boob-plate-armor-would-kill-you"> Tor.com</a> article explored earlier in May, shapely armor (specifically the &ldquo;boob plate&rdquo;) would be a deadly design for warriors.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/commentary.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/commentary.jpg" style="width: 500px; height: 567px;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
The stark distinction between the armor designed for women and men in media speaks to the larger sexist attitudes that still tinge these mediums. In gaming for example, Tica&rsquo;s post titled &ldquo;Clothes I&rsquo;m forced to wear in the majority of MMORPGS&rdquo; received a lot of attention in the online gaming community, even being shared on<a href="http://kotaku.com/thirteen-types-of-ridiculous-female-armor-in-mmorpgs-507570131"> Kotaku</a>. The commentary was more fun than serious on that post, but how it spread and was embraced by female gamers says a lot about the outfits available are far from what women want their characters to wear. Instead, they&#39;re designed for what men, who many believe to be the primary and only customers of these products, would like to see.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
The idea of these genres as male exclusive spaces is not new. Sexism pervades many areas of media, including<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/star-wars-2013-year-fangirl-her-universe/"> science fiction</a>, <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/1reasonwhy-twitter-gaming-sexism-mentors/">gaming</a>, <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/readercon-comic-gamer-sexism-kate-leth/">comics</a>, and even the<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/video-game-fashion-ideas-accessories/"> merchandise</a> created for consumers.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/MMORPGS.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/MMORPGS.jpg" style="width: 637px; height: 521px;" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>Outfits from Tica&rsquo;s &ldquo;Clothes I&rsquo;m forced to wear in the majority of MMORPGS&rdquo; post include the Everyday Archer (</em>left<em>), the Stereotype Shaman or Barbarian (</em>center<em>), the Creative Healer (</em>right<em>), and more.</em></small></p>
<p>
<br />
Even commenting on the disparities between representations of women and men in these mediums is enough to bring out the parts of the male audience who want these spaces to remain purely for them. On Tuesday, it didn&rsquo;t take long for critics of vlogger Anita Sarkeesian to get her second video in her <em>Tropes vs. Women in Video Games</em> series<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/anita-sarkessian-mra-tropes-women-video/"> removed</a> for a time.</p>
<p>
Tica is no stranger to those who think her cause itself is a ridiculous one. From comments as<a href="http://repair-her-armor.tumblr.com/post/50635785625/you-sure-like-to-complain-huh"> short</a> as &ldquo;You sure like to complain, huh?&rdquo; to longer trolling<a href="http://repair-her-armor.tumblr.com/post/50623152787/i-only-came-here-to-see-the-before-shots-a-half-naked"> comments</a> like one from last week, by a man who proclaimed he only visited the blog for the &quot;before&quot; shots because &ldquo;a half-naked chick in a video game is a plus&rdquo; and he hoped his comment made her red in the face. Tica&#39;s responses often end up making the commenters look even more absurd.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/28/cartoonarmor.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/28/cartoonarmor.jpg" style="width: 422px; height: 750px; border-width: 2px; border-style: solid;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
She&rsquo;s not alone in addressing these issues on Tumblr. She affiliates with two other blogs dealing with similar issues:<a href="http://bikiniarmorbattledamage.tumblr.com/"> Bikini Armor Battle Damage</a>, which pokes &ldquo;fun at risks of being a half-naked strong warrior woman,&rdquo; and<a href="http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/"> Escher Girls</a>, a blog dedicated to archiving and showcasing &ldquo;the prevalence of certain ways women are depicted in illustrated pop media, specifically how women are posed, drawn, distorted, and sexualized out of context, often in ridiculous, impossible, or disturbing ways that sacrifice storytelling.&rdquo;</p>
<p>
If the growing number of Tumblrs about this issue (and Repair Her Armor&rsquo;s growing audience) is any indication, this is another area in the media that both women and men think need to be addressed and made fairer for both sexes. Warrior women are supposed to be as strong and capable as their male counterparts, so why do they get the sexualized treatment? As Tica writes in an April<a href="http://repair-her-armor.tumblr.com/post/47608374296/the-latest-submission-shows-off-some-problematic-armor"> post</a>, the problem lies in that these depictions don&rsquo;t treat the woman portrayed as actual characters, but just sex objects.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/fix.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/29/fix.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 399px;" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<small><em>Original image shared by Tica (</em>left<em>), fixed by Tumblr user cold-sunlight (</em>right<em>).</em></small></p>
<p>
<br />
&ldquo;The only thing they seem to focus on is their &lsquo;sexy parts&rsquo; instead of focusing on their actual designs. It&rsquo;s very disrespectful not only to women but for any viewer,&rdquo; Tica writes. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like saying, &lsquo;Hey, LOOK. BOOBS. BUTT. You wouldn&rsquo;t care about this girl/game unless she had some, right?<em>&rsquo; </em>They&rsquo;re basically fap objects. They don&rsquo;t want us to think about their backstory, personality, and whatnot. Just the sexy parts.&rdquo;<br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<em>&nbsp;Images via </em><a href="http://repair-her-armor.tumblr.com/"><em>Repair Her Armor</em></a><em>/Tumblr</em></p>
lisa@dailydot.com (Lisa Granshaw)Wed, 29 May 2013 22:03:09 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/repair-her-armor-skimpy-outfit-redesign/TumblrFandomCultureHow 12 men morphed identities and still voted and bought gunshttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/12-men-swap-id-guns-cultural-hijack/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/f6/ff/f6fff7270775f950010cc667a1a34332.jpg'></p><p>
A dozen men morphed into each other three years ago, and you probably never even heard about it. Their story is now being told at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.culturalhijack.org/">Cultural Hijack</a>, an exhibit&nbsp;underway in London that surveys the &quot;provocative interventions which have inserted themselves into the world, demanding our attention, interrupting everyday life, hijacking, trespassing, agitating and teasing.&quot; And that&#39;s a fitting description of what the Czech art collective Zthoven did in 2010.</p>
<p>
Basically, 12 members of the collective swapped identities, snagging themselves digitally altered ID cards that featured blended images of their portrait and another person&#39;s.&nbsp;<a href="http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2013/05/cultural-hijack.php#.UZ4rM4esh8F">Make Money Not Art</a>&nbsp;explains further: &quot;With the same haircut, twelve members of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ztohoven.com/">Ztohoven</a>&nbsp;took a portrait pictures and using the Morphing software they merged every two faces into one. They applied for new IDs with these photos, but each of them used the name of his alter-ego.&quot;</p>
<p>
<img alt="" src="http://assets2.motherboard.tv/content-images/contentimage/no-slug/392a9f4268c12cba738d6833abb7d949.jpg" style="border:0px;vertical-align:middle;width:425px;height:299px;float:left;" /></p>
<p>
For six months, they then lived under each others&#39; identities, purchasing guns, voting, and even getting married. They documented the entire project, which, in a nod to Kafka&#39;s identity-thieved Josef, they called Citizen K.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
After the six months were up, they publicly exhibited their work in a gallery in Prague. Apparently, the state didn&#39;t find their work amusing&mdash;it wasn&#39;t long until the cops showed up. According to a&nbsp;<a href="http://aktualne.centrum.cz/czechnews/clanek.phtml?id=671259">local Czech newspaper</a>, &quot;On Friday 18 June, police rushed into the public exposition, collecting the fake IDs displayed there and arresting&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_T%C3%BDc">Roman T&yacute;c</a>, the most famous member of the group noted for hacking into a public service TV program with a video montage displaying what looked like a genuine nuke explosion in June 2006.&quot;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="354" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pf8VOi5f7P8" width="630"></iframe></p>
<p>
So yeah; Zthoven had a history of cultural hijackings. They&#39;ve turned this one into a film, and they&#39;re screening it in Europe. On&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ztohoven.com/?page_id=87&amp;lang=en">its website</a>, Zthoven describes the Citizen K undertaking as a political act:&nbsp;</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
I have returned from places where I beheld myself and realised that it is mainly us that matters! We are all a society, we all create the system and we watch one another. We are all involved in the fear that keeps us at a standstill. For all of us I entered the places that others fear to enter and perceived the vanity, the absurdity of obedience. How frail and how easily abused is that which should serve us. We are not numbers, we are not biometric data, so let us not be mere pawns in the hands of the big players on the game board of these times. If we do not wish to fear our own face, we must save it!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Read the full story on <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/12-czech-men-morphed-identities-and-still-voted-bought-guns-and-got-married">Motherboard</a>.</p>
<dd.feed.feeds.NoneAuthor object at 0x7fc209200cd0>Mon, 27 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/12-men-swap-id-guns-cultural-hijack/SocietyCultureCan YouTube roleplay transform Austen's unfinished novel?http://www.dailydot.com/culture/sanditon-transmedia-austen-unfinished-novel/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/d6/6d/d66d9b8922f4c98e88fc233bee1e3c7a.jpg'></p><p>
We <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/lizzie-bennet-diaries-sanditon-austen-unfinished/">can&#39;t get enough</a> of YouTube charmer <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/sanditon-jane-austen-role-playing-twitter-spam/"><em>Sanditon</em></a> here at the Daily Dot. Not only because it&#39;s an Internet culture reporter&#39;s wet dream, but because it just keeps getting cuter.</p>
<p>
Oh, and because this satirical webseries about a fake town has wasted no time in using Jane Austen&#39;s original unfinished novel as a launchpad to do whatever the hell it wants, including roping all of its <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/sanditon-jane-austen-role-playing-twitter-spam/">hundreds of eager roleplayers</a> into the storyline in its latest episode.</p>
<p>
When <em>Sanditon</em> premiered, <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/lizzie-bennet-diaries-sanditon-austen-unfinished/">we wondered</a> how the creators would approach the original storyline, which sadly ended before it really got underway. Austen, writing in the last months of her life, got only 12 chapters in before she had to stop due to pain. Other writers, attempting to finish what she started, have <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;field-keywords=sanditon">taken the novel</a> in the direction of romance.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
For the creators of <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/lizzie-bennet-diaries-kickstarter-dvd-hank-green/"><em>The Lizzie Bennet Diaries</em></a><em>, </em>fresh off <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/pride-prejudice-lizzie-bennet-diaries-200-tribute/">millions of views</a> and a <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/lizzie-bennet-diaries-kickstarter-dvd-hank-green/">wildly successful Kickstarter</a>, romance has <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/lizzie-bennet-diaries-darcyday-darcy-debut/">worked well</a>. But <em>Sanditon</em>, a kind of summer aperitif before their next big project (as yet unannounced), so far seems to be less about spinning a tale of love and more about celebrating the fans of <em>LBD</em> and their endless capacity for elaborating and expanding the story worlds they&#39;re in love with.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
The brilliant thing about using <em>Sanditon</em> as a kind of fandom playground is that expansion is built into the narrative itself. Austen wrote about a coastal English town trying to build itself as a tourist destination and attract new residents. In just two weeks, fans have expanded the fictional town of Sanditon, Calif., by orders of magnitude, creating hundreds of Twitter and Tumblr accounts for their fictional shops, community groups, residents, and town infrastructure. &nbsp;</p>
<p>
And now, with the latest episode, in which roleplayers take to their webcams to talk about their town, many of them have actually become a part of the series itself.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<iframe class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Mi19D-jN2kQ?rel=0" title="YouTube video player" type="text/html" width="640"></iframe></p>
<p>
<em>Sanditon</em> roleplayers are not only a diverse bunch, but a clever bunch. &quot;It almost seems like the entire town of sanditon got twitter within two days,&quot; says one roleplayer, and just like that, <em>Sanditon</em> has become a meta-parody inside a meta-parody of the original parody. &nbsp;</p>
<p>
And if you ever doubted that <em>Sanditon</em> was ultimately about fandom, references to <em>LBD</em> fandom abound throughout the show&#39;s interplay with fans. (The Sanditon softball team is called the Sanditon Seahorses, a reference to the fan name for Lizzie/Darcy shippers.) And the fan-created Sanditon Tea&mdash;perhaps modeling itself after <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/culture/adagio-tea-sherlock-week-fanart-cara-mcgee/">Adagio&#39;s popular real-life fandom tea service</a>&mdash;is making us wish that we could pop in for a Cuppabatch.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
Even if its fandom-friendly marketing is confusing Sanditon&#39;s mayor:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p>
@<a href="https://twitter.com/theedwarddenham">theedwarddenham</a> But the young woman from @<a href="https://twitter.com/sanditontea">sanditontea</a> said I word I didn&#39;t understand. What is &quot;fandom&quot;? Can you draft a memo about it?</p>
&mdash; Tom Parker (@TomPofSanditon) <a href="https://twitter.com/TomPofSanditon/status/337666276614885377">May 23, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>
As fan-friendly as the episodes have been so far, however, they&#39;ve polarized the LBD&#39;s fanbase, many of whom are angry because as non-active participants in the roleplay, they don&#39;t have much actual story to get behind and are feeling left out. Tumblr&#39;s Sanditon tag is a wash of mixed reactions to the latest ep, with many fans <a href="http://decent-enough.tumblr.com/post/51226306303/i-have-some-thoughts">claiming</a> that they feel the series so far has devolved into a mere <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/transmedia-storytelling-roundtable-bernie-su/">transmedia experiment</a>.</p>
<p>
Still, nearly 30 Sanditon &quot;citizens&quot; participated in Thursday&#39;s video. On <a href="http://domino.pemberleydigital.com/sanditon/welcome">the fictional website</a> of Pemberley Digital, the business whose fake digital technology bridges the worlds of <em>Lizzie Bennet</em> and <em>Sanditon</em>, there are nearly 30 <em>pages</em> of &quot;personas&quot;&mdash;people who are uploading videos of themselves interacting with the fictional world of Sanditon and each other.</p>
<p>
We can&#39;t help but think that if Austen were online in 2013, she&#39;d be picking up her camera and joining them.</p>
aja@dailydot.com (Aja Romano)Fri, 24 May 2013 15:50:16 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/sanditon-transmedia-austen-unfinished-novel/FandomCultureJenny Clements plays with fire on deviantARThttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/jenny-clements-deviantart-moth-and-the-flame/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/5b/65/5b65a8db7edd81b389bee16ac6f21501.jpg'></p><p>
For centuries, moths have flocked to the flame.</p>
<p>
Some studies have shown that this phenomenon has to do with the way moths use light to <a href="http://news.psu.edu/story/141283/2008/10/20/research/probing-question-why-are-moths-attracted-light">navigate through the air</a>. The <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/communities/deviantart">deviantART</a> comics of <a href="http://stressedjenny.deviantart.com/">Jenny Clements</a>, on the other hand, show that the attraction is really about love.</p>
<p>
Clements, of Cardiff, Wales, is the author of the popular series Moth and the Flame, a story of forbidden love at first sight.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/17/mothflame1.jpg" /></p>
<p>
&quot;The Moth and the Flame is a metaphor for incompatible relationships and the hurt we go through just to hold on to people who we can&#39;t really be with,&quot; Clements, 28, told the Daily Dot. &quot;They try so hard to be with each other, but in the end it just isn&#39;t enough. It&#39;s about when to let go and how hard it may be to do so, but it&#39;s also about how, despite all the loss, there is something salvageable from such a painful experience.&quot;</p>
<p>
Growing up, Clements&#39; biggest sources of inspiration were her parents. Her mom made homemade greeting cards, and her father was a photographer and graphic artist&mdash;and both of them encouraged her to think outside the sketchpad.</p>
<p>
&quot;One of the earliest things I remember drawing, and I still have it, is a small comic book about animals at the seaside,&quot; Clements said. &quot;I must have made it when I was about 6 or 7 years old. It was about what cats and mice and bats and frogs did when they went to the seaside for a holiday. Bats like water slides apparently.&quot;</p>
<p>
The story of the Moth and the Flame began in 2005. The genderless character Moff was created by Clements because of her love for all things fluffy and endearing. In the beginning, the character looked more like a <a href="http://stressedjenny.deviantart.com/art/Moth-16970841">pixie</a> than an actual moth, but as time went on, Clements&#39;s lifelong passion for Disney animation and comics like Juanjo Guarnido, Pierre Alary, Man Arenas, and Jeff Smith kicked in.&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/16/the_evolution_of_moff_by_stressedjenny-d61x1om.png" /></p>
<p>
Moff never truly had a home or a friend, for that matter. For years, the character existed among Clements&#39;s other drawings of <a href="http://stressedjenny.deviantart.com/art/Pilchard-Pilfer-298155641">mermaids</a>, <a href="http://stressedjenny.deviantart.com/art/Korra-is-Legend-295801074">female adventurers</a>, and <a href="http://stressedjenny.deviantart.com/art/Bust-II-288896347">elegant portraits</a>. That changed in <a href="http://stressedjenny.deviantart.com/art/Flickerlee-347118774">early January</a> when Clements came up with the idea for Flickerlee, a cute flame who would be the object of Moff&#39;s affection. The original plan was for a six-page series featuring both characters, but after her first page collected more than <a href="http://stressedjenny.deviantart.com/art/Moth-and-the-Flame-1-347299491">170,000 views</a>, that quickly changed.</p>
<p>
To date, Clements has produced 21 pages of Moth and the Flame, which have collected about 2 million views combined. Clements isn&#39;t sure how much longer she will produce the series but as long as people keep asking for more, the flame won&#39;t go out.</p>
<p>
&quot;I love to entertain people and make them happy, and to do that with my art is so rewarding,&quot; Clements said. &quot;DeviantART is the perfect outlet for that. It&#39;s why I keep coming back.&quot;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
&bull;&bull;&bull;</p>
<p>
<em>The following Moth and the Flame comic was provided exclusively to the Daily Dot by </em><a href="http://stressedjenny.deviantart.com/"><em>Jenny Clements</em></a><em>. Check out more of the Daily Dot comics </em><a href="http://www.dailydot.com/comics/"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/17/moffmatchweb.jpg" style="height: 452px; width: 640px;" /></p>
<p>
<em>Art by Jenny Clements</em></p>
fernando@dailydot.com (Fernando Alfonso III)Fri, 24 May 2013 11:28:07 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/jenny-clements-deviantart-moth-and-the-flame/DeviantARTCultureThe 10 most popular search terms on Giphyhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/giphy-most-popular-search-terms/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/6b/75/6b75d17baf4b4a6942030218e5f47ef3.jpg'></p><p>
Being a GIF creator stinks if you want to be recognized&mdash;and rewarded&mdash;for your work. On <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/communities/tumblr/">Tumblr</a>, artist attribution often disappears within the first reblog. In <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/communities/reddit/">Reddit</a>&#39;s case, it&#39;s nonexistent to begin with. Users simply don&#39;t care who&#39;s behind <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/business/economy-gif-tumblr-history/">the content they&#39;re sharing</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
Like any artist, GIF creators deserve to make money for their work. Some, like Tumblr funnyman Benjamin &quot;frogman&quot; Grelle, have even taken image sharing sites like <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/news/frogman-imgur-10000-dollars-image-attribution/">Imgur to task</a> for hosting unattributed versions of their images.</p>
<p>
<a href="http://giphy.com/">Giphy</a>, a new <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/lol/giphy-gif-search-review/">GIF search engine</a> founded by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, is trying to fix this problem and do what no other network can: help artists <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/business/economy-gif-tumblr-history/">make some money</a> and promote their name.</p>
<p>
Giphy&#39;s new artist attribution system will encourage artists to share their work and reward users who give credit when sharing it. The search engine has offered private accounts to 12 different illustrators, including <a href="http://frankmacchia.blogspot.com/">Frank Macchia</a>, a Los Angeles&ndash;based comic artist. Macchia dabbles in GIF art and and has been commissioned by Giphy to create original animations.</p>
<p>
The new GIF artist profiles are a &quot;first small step toward building a serious platform for GIF creators,&quot; Cooke told the Daily Dot.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
He gave us the most-searched-for terms on his site. It&#39;s &quot;somewhat embarrassing,&quot; he admitted.</p>
<p>
&quot;It&#39;s probably also worth noting that we automatically filter most NSFW GIFs from our crawls (not for philosophical reasons but because it&#39;s a huge legal and SEO quagmire),&quot; he added.&nbsp;<br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>1. <a href="about:blank">Sex</a> (NSFW)</strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/1sex.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/1sex.gif" style="width: 499px; height: 350px;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>2. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/cat">Cat</a></strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/2cat.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/2cat.gif" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>3. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/boobs">Boobs</a> (NSFW)</strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/3boobs.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/3boobs.gif" style="width: 480px; height: 360px;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>4. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/love">Love</a></strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/4love.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/4love.gif" style="width: 400px; height: 384px;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>5. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/puppy">Puppy</a></strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/5puppy.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/5puppy.gif" style="height: 301px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>6. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/happy">Happy</a></strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/6happy.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/6happy.gif" style="width: 500px; height: 250px;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>7. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/sherlock">Sherlock</a></strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/7sherlock.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/23/sherlock.gif" style="width: 500px; height: 200px;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>8. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/supernatural">Supernatural</a></strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/22/8supernatural.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/22/8supernatural.gif" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>9. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/funny/">Funny</a></strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/22/9funny.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/22/9funny.gif" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<big><strong>10. <a href="http://giphy.com/tags/no">No</a></strong></big></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/22/10no.gif"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/22/10no.gif" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<em>H/T </em><em><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/giphy-gif-search-engine-rolls-out-private-artist-profiles-to-help-organize-monetize-the-gif-community/">Techcrunch</a>&nbsp;|</em><em>&nbsp;Illustration by </em><a href="http://frankmacchia.blogspot.com/"><em>Frank Macchia</em></a></p>
fernando@dailydot.com (Fernando Alfonso III)Thu, 23 May 2013 17:07:34 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/giphy-most-popular-search-terms/CultureCan Kickstarter save manga publishing?http://www.dailydot.com/culture/kickstarter-kansai-club-osamu-tezuka/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/23/ae/23aef6dc622ff992520021662a9fc778.jpg'></p><p>
It took fledgling manga publisher Kansai Club Publishing around nine months to raise the $25,000 royalty fees to license legendary manga creator Osamu Tezuka&#39;s work for publication.</p>
<p>
It took three days to <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kansaiclub/limited-edition-translation-of-osamu-tezukas-the-c">recoup their entire investment on Kickstarter</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
While Tezuka is the most famous manga creator in history, many of his works remain unavailable to English manga fans, and with the U.S. manga publishing industry struggling to find a viable way to compete with the thriving culture of fan-provided free scanlations (in which a fan scans and translates a work, sometimes without publisher permission), each translation attempt has been an uphill battle.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
Thanks to Kickstarter, however, U.S. manga fans might finally be able to crowdfund more of the series and titles they want. This week Kansai Club turned to manga fans on Kickstarter to help bring <em>The Crater</em>, an early collection of Tezuka short stories, to the U.S. Their gamble paid off: less than four days into the project, the Florida-based publisher has exceeded their goal by more than $25,000.</p>
<p>
The stakes for this project are high for a number of reasons. Kansai Club&#39;s debut title was incredibly ambitious. As the author/artist of <em>Astro Boy, </em>and the artistic inspiration for <a href="http://robwrite.hubpages.com/hub/THE-LION-KING-Controversy-Did-Disney-Rip-off-Kimba-the-White-Lion">every scene you remember from <em>The Lion King</em></a>, Tezuka is the Japanese equivalent to Walt Disney, an industry pioneer whose influence cannot be overstated. But many of his works, including <em>Crater</em>, a 1969 series of horror short stories in comic form, have never been translated in the U.S.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
It took Kansai Club six months to convince the Tezuka estate to grant them translation rights, and then a few more to raise the royalty fees. You can practically hear the exhaustion. &quot;This project of ours is all or nothing,&quot; Kansai wrote:&nbsp;</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
This book will be published regardless of Kickstarter; too much time and money have already been invested into this project. At the same time, as a brand new publishing company, we NEED Kickstarter and the support of Osamu Tezuka fans in order to make our first project successful. If we are forced to sell this book through Amazon we may actually lose money on each book sold.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
With a limited run of 2,000 copies, Kanzai set their goal at a relatively modest goal of $3,500, enough to cover hard copy publication costs. But with 650-plus backers, they may be able to expand the number of available copies. And there are 30 days to go.</p>
<p>
Tezuka&#39;s round-eyed characters, cute design, and Disney-like artwork have inspired everything from <em>Sailor Moon </em>to <em>My Little Pony</em>. But while his artistry is very familiar to English-language manga fans, few know his early works. <em>Crater</em> is classic Tezuka in that it combines his trademark artistic style with dark themes and suspenseful plots.&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/21/tezuka2.jpg" style="height: 844px; width: 600px;" /></p>
<p>
The 17 short stories in the collection were originally published in serial comic form before being collected into an anthology. Manga blogger Katherine Dacey <a href="http://mangabookshelf.com/35803/manga-artifacts-memories/#comment-59725">commented</a> on the series&#39; lack of availability in 2011.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
I would love to see Tezuka&rsquo;s <em>Crater</em> licensed. Three volumes of short, experimental stories by Tezuka in a variety of genres? Yes, please! &hellip; I&rsquo;ve been contemplating buying <em>Crater</em> through a Japanese bookseller &hellip; but since I can&rsquo;t read [the series], it&rsquo;s probably better to save my pennies for something I *can* read!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Kansai Club&#39;s project is not the first major manga translation project to get a boost from Kickstarter. Notably, Digital Manga has used the site to crowdfund <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitalmanga/publish-osamu-tezukas-unico-in-english-in-full-col">multiple</a> <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitalmanga/bring-back-osamu-tezukas-swallowing-the-earth">Tezuka</a> <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitalmanga/publish-osamu-tezukas-barbara-in-english">translation</a> projects. At least part of the appeal of Kickstarter for manga fans has to be the upfront assurance that if funded, a project will be seen through to its completion, and that participants will have access to everything they paid for. U.S. manga publishers have numerous difficulties to contend with in order to reach their readers: Limited titles available for licensing, limited shelf space in bookstores, the closing of former manga distributor Borders, competing pirated translations, and mid-series cancellations are all problems that plague the industry. E-publishing brings with it even more concerns. Recently Digital Manga publisher JManga <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/news/jmanga-japanese-comics-cloud-shut-down/">shocked everyone by abruptly closing</a> less than a year and a half after going into business&mdash;taking dozens of incomplete series and cloud-hosted user purchases along with it.</p>
<p>
For Kansai Club, whose <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/kansaiclub">sole goal</a> is to bring obscure and vintage manga to the U.S., the Kickstarter success is about more than finding a better way of satisfying frustrated readers. It&#39;s about starting their business.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Everyone needs to start somewhere and this is where it begins for us. EVERY penny made through the sales of this book and ALL related goods will go right back into our next project. If this Kickstarter campaign fails, then we will likely become defunct, never to see our dreams realized. However, if we succeed, then our future holds no boundaries. We have faith in you, so please have faith in us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
If the growing reliance on manga fans to fund projects through Kickstarter is any indication, it seems readers are putting all their faith, not just in Kansai Club, but in the crowdfunding method in general.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
For manga publishing in the U.S., Kickstarter may prove to be an increasingly necessary way to make sure that more authors like Tezuka reach the English-language audience they&#39;ve long deserved.</p>
<p>
<em>H/T </em><em><a href="https://twitter.com/mangabookshelf/status/336278242220711936">@MangaBookshelf</a>&nbsp;|</em><em>&nbsp;Photos via </em><em><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kansaiclub/limited-edition-translation-of-osamu-tezukas-the-c">Kickstarter</a></em></p>
aja@dailydot.com (Aja Romano)Wed, 22 May 2013 12:10:32 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/kickstarter-kansai-club-osamu-tezuka/FandomKickstarterCultureBiggr may not be bettr for Flickr usrshttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/yahoo-flickr-redesign-biggr-bettr/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/0d/e0/0de0eae33ece631564961742b6a7d070.jpg'></p><p>
At Yahoo&#39;s triumphant press conference yesterday in New York, it tried admirably to take the spotlight off its <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/business/tumblr-yahoo-david-karp-press-release-fk-yeah/">latest acquisition</a>, <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/communities/tumblr/">Tumblr</a>, and shine it on photo-based social network Flickr. In addition to unveiling a brand-new redesign that prioritizes big, bold images above nearly all other forms of content, Yahoo announced Flickr users now had a terabyte of personal storage space, pursuant to their goal of being &quot;Biggr. Spectaculr. Wherevr.&quot;</p>
<p>
But even as questions flew about the Yahoo Tumblr merger (Mergr?), and while Tumblr <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/tumblr-fake-yahoo-staff-trolls-lol/">continued</a> to <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/tumblr-users-petition-167000-signatures/">rage quit</a> over the news, Flickr users went into defensive mode. Angry and upset that Yahoo had deployed the dramatic changes without any advance warning or user guides, they flooded the site&#39;s <a href="http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506/">announcement notice</a>. In just under 18 hours the page has garnered over 100 pages of comments from frustrated users upset with the changes in functionality, navigation, and layout.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
A <a href="http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506/72157633531620767/">widely seconded comment</a> by Flickr user Carter Baldwin summed up the feelings of nearly everyone on the thread: &quot;this. is. FUCKING. HIDEOUS.&quot;</p>
<p>
On May 19, the basic Flickr layout was a horizontal navigation paired with a narrow photo-gallery grid with evenly sized thumbnails, lots of text, and a white background. On May 20, the layout essentially reversed itself: White became black; thumbnails in a narrow space became variously sized photos crammed together on a large page; lots of text became almost no text. It was a dramatic, take-it-or-leave-it change. So far, for most Flickr users, the response seems to be a flat-out rejection. &quot;500px is better,&quot; declared <a href="http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506/72157633571589712/">noirdelux</a>. &quot;Even deviantArt is better. If it doesn&#39;t change back, I&#39;ll be gone soon.&quot;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/21/redesign.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/21/redesign.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 422px;" /></a></p>
<p>
Yahoo took a huge gamble with the Flickr redesign, especially coming at a moment when everyone is looking at Yahoo&#39;s relationship with Flickr users as a study of its potential relationship with Tumblr users. At yesterday&#39;s press conference, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer assured attendees that Yahoo&#39;s new executive team had learned from past mistakes, which include a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and_services">notoriously long line of failed acquisitions</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
But judging solely by the response to the Flickr redesign coming from its core userbase, it seems Yahoo is repeating past mistakes: making major decisions and changes without consulting its core communities of users, and <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/business/10-lessons-tumblr-teach-yahoo-internet/">attempting to fix what isn&#39;t broken</a>.</p>
<p>
&quot;I feel cheated and ripped off,&quot; <a href="http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506/72157633571654260/">commented</a> longtime Flickr user Brian Aslak.&nbsp;</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
My 9 years of loyalty to Flickr has been punished.</p>
<p>
STOP PISSING ON MY LEG AND TELLING ME IT&#39;S RAINING!</p>
<p>
I am so angry at the Flickr staff that I could cry.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
One of the core points of contention is that the site&#39;s navigation. Functionality also seems to be slow; many users cited trouble loading pictures in Flickr&#39;s new &quot;endless scroll&quot; feature. Another is that while Yahoo emphasized how much better photos would look on the new layout, some users feel it actually undermines the community&#39;s basic appeal to photographers.</p>
<p>
&quot;The way [the photos] are all crammed together in one space is against the general practice of how photographers display their photos&mdash;alone and surrounded by either white or black,&quot; one longtime Flickr user anonymously told the Daily Dot. &quot;Plus the old way, you could see stuff like the date / location / copyright status right below each photo, which, as a photoresearcher, made everything a little easier.&quot;</p>
<p>
Upset users may not be the only trouble Flickr has with the new redesign. Yesterday, within hours after Yahoo announced the terabyte of free storage space, <a href="https://github.com/meltingice/flickr-store">a Github thread</a> was telling users how to access the storage site for non-photo-related file sharing.</p>
<p>
A terabyte can hold a lot of goodies from the Pirate Bay. Just saying.</p>
<p>
Still, optimism was the byword at Yahoo this week, with Mayer professing confidence in the Tumblr merger, which she said grew out of a look at potential partnerships with Tumblr. With a press release that took the unconventional approach of declaring &quot;We promise not to screw it up,&quot; Yahoo certainly seems to be looking to forge a bond with Tumblr&#39;s millions of teen and tween users.</p>
<p>
Meanwhile, their bond with their 87 million Flickr users, continues to, well, flickr.</p>
aja@dailydot.com (Aja Romano)Tue, 21 May 2013 17:27:48 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/yahoo-flickr-redesign-biggr-bettr/DebugCulture3-D printing could be the future of the Smithsonianhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/3d-printing-smithsonian-artifacts-collection/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/10/c8/10c8b80cdc1f1e1dce0e66144894f0b9.jpg'></p><p>
&ldquo;America&rsquo;s attic,&rdquo; as the <a href="http://www.si.edu/">The Smithsonian Institution</a> is known, has begun an ambitious project to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWoqTGEw7WA">3-D scan its enormous collection</a> of 137 million items.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
This could take a while.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
Last year, as Inhabitat notes, the Smithsonian <a href="http://inhabitat.com/smithsonian-institute-uses-3d-printing-to-replicate-part-of-its-collection/smithsonian-institute-thoma/?extend=1">scanned and 3-D printed</a> one of the most famous American statues, the Monticello bust of the country&rsquo;s third president, Thomas Jefferson.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
The utility of scanning items in such a way that they can be printed out by anyone with the software scan instructions (and a 3-D scanner) is that many more people can access objects that are otherwise singular. It also provides a set of backups for the museum.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
Institutional 3-D printing is an extension of the democratization of information made possible by the rise of the Web and easy digitization.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
For those unfamiliar with the process, the first step is to digitally scan an object in the round. The digitization provides a blueprint for the 3-D printer, which builds up an object using a plastic tank that precisely extrudes plastic from a set of nozzles from the bottom up. The finished object is cured and surfaced with dye or paint and textured.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
This has previously been done with <a href="http://readwrite.com/2011/02/17/using_3d_printing_to_repair_rodins_thinker">Rodin&rsquo;s thinker</a>, after it was damaged by a nut with a hatchet, and to Egyptian Pharaoh <a href="http://readwrite.com/2010/10/26/printing_tut_3d_printing_brings_pharoah_back_to_de">Tutankhamun</a>, in order to to tour his mummy.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
The Smithsonian&rsquo;s scan specialists, Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo, are currently leading a team working on the gunboat Philadelphia, built in 1776 and sunk the same year by the British.</p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: center;">
<iframe class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="365" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AWoqTGEw7WA?rel=0" title="YouTube video player" type="text/html" width="630"></iframe></p>
<p dir="ltr">
This project will also allow people around the nation, and world, to do research they would normally not be able to, virtually walking around, into and through, a once-living object that carries in it the beginning of the United States Navy.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
Other scanning targets include fossils and artifacts.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
It may be some time before you can print your own personal copies of historical artifacts, though. &ldquo;Unfortunately, we have no plans to make 3D scans of our collection freely available for the public to print,&rdquo; a Smithsonian rep <a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/02/29/smithsonian-building-archive-o.html">told BoingBoing in 2012</a>.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
&ldquo;Our 3-D team mentioned that we COULD go there theoretically, but as of right now it is not part of our plan.&rdquo;</p>
<p>
<em>H/T <a href="http://inhabitat.com/smithsonian-institution-reveals-it-has-begun-to-3d-scan-its-entire-collection/">Inhabitat</a> | Photo by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/SmithsonianVideos">Smithsonian</a></em></p>
curthopkins@gmail.com (Curt Hopkins)Tue, 14 May 2013 20:15:05 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/3d-printing-smithsonian-artifacts-collection/DebugCultureWhy fanfic is better than any fake boyfriendhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/how-to-fake-a-boyfriend-fanfic/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/f1/db/f1dbffa1793ef9c253eadfe6b42d0ff7.jpg'></p><p>
Even before the Internet, humanity has long had its share of people who prefer made-up companions to real ones, often creating fake friends, relationships, and sometimes even <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1243205.ece">elaborate webs of fictional identities</a> interacting with one another. And with the Internet, it&rsquo;s easier than ever to have a fake relationship.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
But you don&rsquo;t need to go <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/manti-teo-5-ways-fake-internet-girlfriend/">Full Manti</a> to get the fake significant other of your dreams. Just ask <a href="http://www.wikihow.com/Fake-Having-a-Boyfriend">WikiHow</a>, an open-source website for free advice. Want a fake boyfriend? All you need is some imagination and a willingness to write fanfic of your own life.</p>
<p>
Why would you want to buy a fake boyfriend? Lots of reasons, both personal and social. While the whole &quot;faking a relationship&quot; thing smacks of wish fulfillment, if half of Asia and the thousands of guys who have <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/girlfriendhire-internet-girlfriend-trial/">bought fake girlfriends over the Internet</a> are to be believed, there&rsquo;s actually a huge social component involved. For some people, like Helen Fielding&rsquo;s fictional Bridget Jones, being single is an uncomfortable social stigma that makes for constantly awkward social gatherings, and the annoyance of having to find a &ldquo;plus one&rdquo; for your social life.</p>
<p>
In fact, in some Asian cultures, the act of <a href="http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/bbc-world-service/fake-boyfriends-rent-chinese-new-year">renting a fake boyfriend</a> goes well beyond the casual escort service and into a theory of social interactions called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%29">Face Theory</a>. Face theory posits that maintaining social prestige, aka &ldquo;Face,&rdquo; is one of the most important facets of human interactions. With a rented fake boyfriend, you don&rsquo;t need to bother explaining to anyone why you never went out with the mouth-breather they tried to set you up with last Christmas, or, worse, when you&rsquo;re going to start &ldquo;settling down.&rdquo; You can maintain your social stature, avoid awkward questions, and skip turning every family get-together into a re-enactment of an Ozu film.</p>
<p>
That said, sometimes you just want Mr. Sandman to bring you a dream. And heck, if a fake girlfriend is good enough for Ryan Gosling to snuggle up to, then it&rsquo;s good enough for you.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/13/lars.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 398px;" /><br />
<small><em>Photo via </em><em><a href="http://filmtrivia.tumblr.com/post/12716461250/in-the-real-story-of-lars-and-the-real-girl-a">filmtrivia/Tumblr</a></em></small></p>
<p>
But you don&rsquo;t need to invest in an inflatable doll or pay off someone to be your beard. You don&rsquo;t even have to <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/manti-teo-5-ways-fake-internet-girlfriend/">buy a boyfriend</a> over the Internet. According to WikiHow, you only need to follow these simple steps:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
1) Create basic facts about your boyfriend.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
2) Create an email for him, at Hotmail, for example.</p>
<p>
3) If possible, get a male friend of yours to impersonate your &quot;boyfriend&quot;</p>
<p>
4) Make up names for his family and friends</p>
<p>
5) Show off the gifts &quot;he&quot; bought for you.</p>
<p>
6) Come up with a good excuse as to why he can&#39;t meet your friends.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
7) Stage a break-up.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Sure, this may all seem like something out of the movie <em>Clueless</em>&mdash;remember when Cher sends herself flowers to get Christian&rsquo;s attention?&mdash;but if you reverse the gender on the steps in the WikiHow entry, you have a hilariously close approximation of the steps that led to Manti Te&#39;o having a fake girlfriend.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
Perhaps there&rsquo;s an even better, less expensive way to go about the elaborate business of obtaining romantic fulfillment without the need for a real-life investment. Do what millions of people since time immemorial have done, and write yourself into the romanticized story of your life. In fandom, this is called creating a <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/how-to-speak-fangirl/">Mary Sue or a Gary Stu</a>&mdash;a self-insert where you star as the dream girl, or guy, that all your favorite fictional characters are in love with. (Outside of fandom, it might be called <em>Twilight</em>.)</p>
<p>
Or you could just focus your <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/culture/tumblr-fandom-is-modern-day-sonnet-really/">emotional investment</a> on public personalities. After all, the time you spend creating fake facts about your fake boyfriend could be spent creating <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/culture/one-direction-fans-tinhat-larry-stylinson/">elaborate fake facts</a>&nbsp;about a real One Direction member! As a general rule, however, perhaps you should avoid applying your theories to <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/one-direction-larry-stylinson-clive-calder/">their very real girlfriends</a>. Even if you believe them to be&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/society/one-direction-larry-fandom-denial/">real <em>fake</em> girlfriends</a>. OK, now this thing just has too many layers for us to parse.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
The more time you spend making up elaborate fictional boyfriends, the less time you have to spend being annoyed at real ones. After all, say what you must about Harry Potter, he&rsquo;s the perfect boyfriend: We&rsquo;re sure he never left the toilet seat up, cheated on Ginny, or called a girl a rude slur on the Internet. And if you&rsquo;re missing out on the perfect relationship, that, too, can exist in your head, through the wonders of shipping. If you can&rsquo;t be the perfect soulmate for that fictional character you&rsquo;re attached to, fandom will be happy to make sure they end up with another fictional character who is&mdash;sometimes many of them at once!</p>
<p>
Plus, with a fictional character as your boyfriend, you can scratch item No. 6, &ldquo;Come up with a good reason for why he can&rsquo;t meet your friends,&rdquo; off your list. Instead, you might have to explain to your family why you&rsquo;re spending so much time on Tumblr.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
But let&rsquo;s be real: Spending way too much time on the Internet is what got you into this mess to begin with.</p>
<p>
<em>Photo via </em><a href="http://cutfromthesun.tumblr.com/post/48553748044/dutch-artist-noortje-de-keijzer-knitted-a"><em>cutfromthesun/Tumblr</em></a></p>
aja@dailydot.com (Aja Romano)Tue, 14 May 2013 19:32:50 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/how-to-fake-a-boyfriend-fanfic/FandomCultureBing can now translate Klingon for youhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/bing-translate-klingon-star-trek-into-darkness/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/1b/f7/1bf79e4d08f9aba6ef11686d643a062e.jpg'></p><p>
Get ready, Trekkies! Soon you&rsquo;ll have another tool to use when trying to learn the language of <em>Star Trek</em>&rsquo;s most popular warrior race.</p>
<p>
On Tuesday, May 14, the Klingon language will be added to Internet search engine Bing&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.bing.com/translator">translator</a> as part of a marketing partnership between Microsoft and Paramount Pictures. The addition comes just in time for the release of <em>Star Trek: Into Darkness</em>, which opens in the United States on May 17.</p>
<p>
&quot;We have people who understand the deep science of linguistics and we also have people who are passionate about the <em>Star Trek </em>franchise,&quot; Craig Beilinson, director of communications for Bing, told the <em><a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-klingon-language-coming-to-bing-20130513,0,6870238.story">Los Angeles Times</a></em>. &quot;This was a labor of love from a lot of different avenues.&quot;</p>
<p>
People will be able to translate Klingon phrases into one of Bing&rsquo;s 41 offered languages and vice versa. The translation was developed with the help of one of the few people who speak Klingon, Microsoft engineer Eric Andeen, and linguist Marc Oakland, who originally developed the language off some ad-libbed words by James Doohan as Scotty in <em>Star Trek: The Motion Picture.</em></p>
<p>
&ldquo;Recognizing Klingon language on the Bing translator, along with other elements of this partnership, truly underscores the pop culture relevance of the film,&rdquo; LeeAnne Stables, executive vice president of worldwide marketing partnerships for Paramount, said.</p>
<p>
The translator won&rsquo;t be the first online way to learn Klingon. The <a href="http://www.kli.org/">Klingon Language Institute</a> has offered online resources for learning about the linguistics and culture of the alien race since 1992. For those of us who just need a quick phrase translated however, we finally have a way to do it! <em>Qapla&rsquo;</em>!</p>
<p>
If you have no idea what that means, now you know where to look.</p>
<p>
<em>H/T </em><a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-klingon-language-coming-to-bing-20130513,0,6870238.story"><em>L.A. TImes</em></a> | <em>Photo via </em><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/14/klingon-to-invade-bing-translator/"><em>Engadget</em></a></p>
lisa@dailydot.com (Lisa Granshaw)Tue, 14 May 2013 13:54:49 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/bing-translate-klingon-star-trek-into-darkness/DebugCultureThis mesmerizing map shows Wikipedia edits as they happenhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/map-wikipedia-changes-edits-live/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/c4/ee/c4ee53c425f03228b0164d5e18296cf7.jpg'></p><p dir="ltr">
As I write this, someone in Cincinnati just modified the Wikipedia entry of the 2002 film &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfaithful_%282002_film%29">Unfaithful</a>.&quot; Someone else in Spruce Pine, N.C., just update the article on jazz trumpeter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizzy_Gillespie">Dizzy Gillespie</a>.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
I know this not because I obsessively scrutinize these two articles every morning for changes. No, I know about these changes because I&#39;ve been obsessively scrutinizing <a href="http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en">this map</a>.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
It&#39;s the Wikipedia Recent Change Map, the latest in a line of web tools that help put the world&#39;s largest online encyclopedia into a macro perspective. It&#39;s one of many new apps and sites that have come along recently to monitor Wikipedia traffic and convert it into usable data.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
It&#39;s the creation of Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi. It launched on May 1 with a relatively simple purpose: Allowing people to see in real time where Wikipedia edits are coming from.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
&quot;This map listens to live feeds of Wikipedia revisions, broadcast using<a href="https://github.com/hatnote/wikimon"> wikimon</a>,&quot; LaPorte and Hashemi write on their blog. &quot;We built the map using a few nice libraries and services, including<a href="http://d3js.org/"> d3</a>,<a href="http://datamaps.github.io/"> DataMaps</a>, and<a href="http://freegeoip.net/"> freegeoip.net</a>. This project was inspired by<a href="http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/"> WikipediaVision</a>&rsquo;s (almost) real-time edit visualization.&quot;</p>
<p dir="ltr">
The map was designed clearly out of a passion for data visualization, and indeed it is hypnotic to watch. If you&#39;re a wee bit on the nerdy side, you can&#39;t help but stare at the dots lighting up one after another across the globe. Then you look down at the corresponding text and wonder why someone in New York felt compelled to edit the entry for &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Syndrome">The China Syndrome</a>&quot; at the same time someone in Staunton, VA had to edit the article about Bon Jovi&#39;s &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livin%27_on_a_Prayer">Livin&#39; On A Prayer</a>.&quot;</p>
<p dir="ltr">
It&#39;s not perfect though. Because of how Wikipedia registration works, the map can only track changes made by unregistered users&mdash;who account for only 15 to 20 percent of total Wikipedia edits.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
But LaPorte and Hashemi&#39;s map is just the latest attempt to harness Wikipedia traffic into usable data. Earlier this year, engineers from Google launched <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-breaking-news-app-accuracy/">Wikipedia Live Monitor</a>, an app that reports breaking news based on spikes in Wikipedia edits to a particular topic. The app is being promoted as a potential rival for Twitter in terms of being able to accurately report breaking news in real time using crowdsourced information.</p>
<p dir="ltr">
&quot;The main motivation of using Wikipedia instead of social media is you get a lot of events in one place&mdash;almost everything relevant in a breaking news sense has a Wikipedia page,&quot; said Tom Steiner, who developed the live monitor app with two other researchers.</p>
<p>
<em>Image via <a href="http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en">Wikipedia Recent Change Map</a></em></p>
tim@dailydot.com (Tim Sampson)Mon, 13 May 2013 17:51:14 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/map-wikipedia-changes-edits-live/DebugWikipediaCultureYelling myths at the Internethttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/myths-retold-zeus-grants-stupid-wishes/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/dc/4e/dc4e7c1b7e9a676f7772f4f5b60df0a0.jpg'></p><p>
The best way to learn about mythology is by going to college or watching movies like <em>Thor </em>and <em>Troy</em>, right? Wrong. For the past few years, <a href="http://bettermyths.com/">Myths RETOLD</a> has been sharing the world&rsquo;s oldest stories using a kind of caps-locked slam poetry. Or as the site&rsquo;s author Cory O&rsquo;Brien puts it, &ldquo;Yelling myths at the internet.&rdquo;</p>
<p>
With titles like &ldquo;<a href="http://bettermyths.com/charlemagne-is-heteroflexible/">Charlemagne is Heteroflexible</a>&rdquo; and &ldquo;<a href="http://bettermyths.com/daedalus-is-a-way-bigger-asshole-than-you-suspected/">Daedalus is a Way Bigger Asshole Than You Suspected</a>,&rdquo; Myths RETOLD takes on everything from Aesop&rsquo;s Fables to the Zoroastrians. The thing about most ancient myths is that they lend themselves <em>really</em> well to this kind of crude and funny, rap/poetry style. They have timeless themes: murder, incest, dick jokes, and bearded men dressing in drag to marry an ice giant and steal back their magical hammer. (Spoiler alert: That one didn&rsquo;t make it into the <em>Thor</em> movie.)</p>
<p>
For O&rsquo;Brien, this passion for mythology recently resulted in a book deal. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/039916040X/thedailygrail"><em>Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology</em></a> came out earlier this year, featuring an intriguing selection of (awesomely genuine) myths that you&rsquo;ve probably only heard in their cleaned-up, child-friendly versions. The book&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/039916040X/thedailygrail">blurb</a> is in iteself an eye-opener:</p>
<ul>
<li>
Zeus once stuffed an unborn fetus inside his thigh to save its life after he exploded its mother by being too good in bed.</li>
<li>
The Hindu universe is run by a married couple who only stop murdering in order to throw sweet dance parties&hellip;<em>on the corpses of their enemies.</em></li>
<li>
The Norse goddess Freyja once consented to a four-dwarf gangbang in exchange for one shiny necklace.</li>
</ul>
<p>
Curious about this one-man crusade to educate the world on classic mythology, we contacted Cory O&rsquo;Brien for a chat.</p>
<p>
<strong><em>Daily Dot: </em></strong><em>What made you start yelling myths at the Internet?</em></p>
<p>
<strong>Cory O&rsquo;Brien: </strong>I decided to start yelling myths at the Internet because I was yelling myths at one of my friends on the Internet and she told me to go make a website instead. I was pretty drunk so I took her advice. Does that make me an academic? I hope not.</p>
<p>
Academia has done an almost irreparable amount of damage to these stories, because they are fun vampires. I do not mean that they are vampires who are good at parties. I mean they are vampires who feast on fun, draining every last ounce of it from their unsuspecting prey. I don&#39;t know what they do with all the fun they slurp up, because they sure aren&#39;t having any. I will admit that many of the stories I knew when I started the site came from my time as an English major. But many more of them came from my Dad&#39;s theater company, We Tell Stories, and there was <em>nothing</em> academic about that band of parti-colored California hippies.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/10/bettermyths2.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 1129px;" /><br />
<small><em>Illustration via </em><a href="http://historywithatwist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-zany-genius-of-zeus-grants-stupid.html"><em>historywithatwist</em></a></small></p>
<p>
<strong><em>DD:</em></strong><em> Can you tell us a little about the book? Is it mostly myths from your website, or is there some prose in there as well?</em></p>
<p>
<strong>CO:</strong> It&#39;s basically all myths (from 11 different cultures, give or take), but about a third of them are unique to the book. The ones that carry over from my website have been skillfully edited. The jokes are funnier, the morals are cleverer, and the myths as a whole are snappier. (Also the grammar is a little better.) Plus, there are beautiful illustrations (by the illustrious<a href="http://s-melville.blogspot.com/"> Sarah E. Melville</a>), which I have ruined with a sharpie.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/10/Untitled_document_-_Google_Drive.png" style="width: 492px; height: 213px;" /></p>
<p>
<strong><em>DD: </em></strong><em>Do you ever get the impression that people are misunderstanding Myths RETOLD?</em></p>
<p>
<strong>CO:</strong> I don&#39;t really believe in misunderstandings. If someone doesn&#39;t understand what I&#39;m trying to do, that means I&#39;m not communicating effectively. The whole point of Myths RETOLD is to tell these stories in a way that everybody can understand, so we can enjoy them the way our ancestors did. I know that&#39;s not what you&#39;re getting at. You want to know if people have been offended by my flippant approach to their/other people&#39;s religions. I&#39;ve been cautioned against steamrolling indigenous traditions a couple of times, but always in a polite and highly informative way. I can think of one instance where an enraged Christian went off on&nbsp;<a href="http://bettermyths.com/what-do-i-keep-telling-you-guys-about-god/">my version of the Book of Job</a>, but that guy was a real live crazy person, so I didn&#39;t lose a lot of sleep over it.</p>
<p>
<strong><em>DD:</em></strong><em> Are you a lot like Myths RETOLD in real life? I&#39;m imagining a guy in a plastic crown challenging a subway ticket machine to a duel because he didn&#39;t have the correct change, maybe.</em></p>
<p>
<strong>CO:</strong> I don&#39;t usually wear a crown, but I also don&#39;t wear shoes. I get into more arguments with the subway security guards than with the ticket machines, but that&#39;s only because by now the machines know who&#39;s boss.</p>
<p>
<strong><em>DD:</em></strong><em> Do you have a favorite myth?</em></p>
<p>
<strong>CO:</strong> Elvis.</p>
<p>
<em>Photo via Flickr/</em><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/abir82/3963123484/sizes/l/"><em>Abeeeer</em></a></p>
gavia@dailydot.com (Gavia Baker-Whitelaw)Mon, 13 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/myths-retold-zeus-grants-stupid-wishes/CultureHow to use DeviantArt to launch your comic-art careerhttp://www.dailydot.com/culture/chris-copeland-deviantart-comic-art/<p><img src='http://cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/90/57/9057ff4e616bd3e591a404b4d4f84a47.jpg'></p><p>
Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, <a href="http://chriscopeland.deviantart.com/">Chris Copeland</a> was more likely to pick up a gun than a paintbrush. That&#39;s why he credits his mother for giving him a leg up into the world of comic art.</p>
<p>
&quot;My mom was amazing at expanding our horizons,&quot; Copeland told the Daily Dot. &quot;She had this way of introducing us to different things that we were exposed to in our neighborhood. We grew up always imagining, always dreaming, playing, and filming things. We used to make Batman costumes for Cabbage Patch dolls.&quot;</p>
<p>
Today, Copeland, 31, still makes costumes for superheroes. Only now he&#39;s doing it as a storyboard artist for Marvel, a job he would have never landed if it were not for <a href="http://www.deviantart.com/">DeviantArt</a>, an online art community.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<a href="http://chriscopeland.deviantart.com/">Copeland</a> has been working on Marvel&#39;s animated <em>Avengers </em>series for the past year. Using a Cintiq Wacom tablet, Copeland and a team of storyboard artists transform a 32-page script each month into detailed illustrations.</p>
<p>
&quot;It&#39;s insane because you&#39;re responsible for every little action,&quot; Copeland said. &quot;There&#39;s a lot of math that goes into it. Storyboarding is really challenging and I absolutely love it.&quot;</p>
<p>
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/10/him2.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/10/him2.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 495px;" /></a><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
One of the other reasons why Copeland loves his work is because of the people he sees everyday. This includes his brother <a href="http://jusdog.deviantart.com/">Justin</a>, a fellow storyboard artist and the person who inspired him to join DeviantArt nearly 10 years ago.</p>
<p>
Like many artists fresh out of college, Copeland struggled with figuring out how to break into the world of animation. He&#39;s studied under painter <a href="http://www.annnathangallery.com/artists/46/">Bruno Surdo</a>&nbsp;at the Illinois Institute of Art&nbsp;and worked at a Chicago art gallery as a research specialist. He also has big ideas. One of them was about a comic series poking fun at <em>The Last Samurai, </em>a period drama about an American military officer (played by Tom Cruise) who is trained as a samurai warrior in Japan. The comic series was called HIM and was inspired by those ultra-talented secondary characters who often gets short-shrift and are &quot;tasked with training the main character&quot; like Cruise, Copeland added. With no job in sight, and no place to showcase his work, Copeland&#39;s brother told him about DeviantArt, a budding art community out of Hollywood.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
&quot;He just knew that I would love it,&quot; Copeland added. &quot;As far as what attracted me to it, I would have to say there were a few different things, like seeing art form so many different artists, to receiving feedback from other artists that i had began following, it was just awesome to be a part of a community that felt new and driven in terms of art.&quot;</p>
<p>
Copeland&#39;s comics and illustrations were well received on DeviantArt and ultimately gave him the courage to reach out to well known artists in the business. One of them was <a href="http://philbourassa.deviantart.com/">Phil Bourassa</a>, a lead character designer for the Emmy Award&ndash;winning Warner Brothers series <em>Young Justice. </em>Bourassa invited Copeland to visit the Warner Brothers studios and shortly after was offered a job.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
<img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/10/chrisspiderman.jpg" style="width: 570px; height: 390px;" /><br />
&nbsp;</p>
<p>
Since then, <a href="http://chriscopeland.deviantart.com/">Copeland</a> has worked for Cartoon Network, Hasbro, and Marvel Studios. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons (and a baby girl on the way), right down the street from his brother. To date, he knows of at least 15 other artists who have used DeviantArt to land jobs in animation.&nbsp;</p>
<p>
Copeland is currently working on a Kickstarter to support his sketch book titled C<em>omic Relief: The Art of </em><em>Chris </em><em>Copeland</em>. &nbsp;It&#39;s a collection of his unseen art as well as some of his fans favorites. In it will also contain a six-to-eight page preview of his graphic novel title &quot;HIM.&quot;</p>
<p>
&quot;I think when I look back at it all, it&#39;s weird what it has all come to,&quot; Copeland said. &quot;I&#39;m so grateful for DeviantArt, I really am. I preach about the site all the time, it has really given me and so many other artists a voice, and a stage, and i have made some really amazing friends and have been able to sit front row and watch my growth as an artist, as well as so many others. I suppose looking back I can say that I&#39;m really happy with how its all taken place so far, and I now look forward to being a part of it all.&quot;</p>
<p>
<em>The following comic is from HIM and was provided exclusively to the Daily Dot. It will be featured in Comic Relief: The Art of </em><em>Chris </em><em>Copeland. Check out more of the Daily Dot comics </em><a href="http://www.dailydot.com/comics/"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p>
<a href="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/10/Himsmaller1.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2013/5/10/Himsmaller1.jpg" style="width: 640px; height: 396px;" /></a></p>
fernando@dailydot.com (Fernando Alfonso III)Fri, 10 May 2013 19:52:11 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/culture/chris-copeland-deviantart-comic-art/DeviantARTCulture